Chapter Text
Three weeks after his mother turned to dust, Harley Keener starts to truly panic.
He’s kept it together as best he can for his little sister because that’s honestly what he’s always done. Ariel has always been a smidge on the annoying side and he’s done his fair share of making her throw a tantrum but he’ll be damned if he makes his baby sister cry. At first it can’t be helped; their mother is gone, dead, turned to dust in the middle of a Saturday lunch and Ariel cries. They both do. But then the news comes in. Airplanes drop out of the sky. Cars crash by the thousands, all at once. Chaos erupts from the ashes all around the world, but the sleepy town of Rose Hill, Tennessee becomes sleepier and Harley gets it together. It seems the random selection of half the universe just so happens to take most of his town.
That’s what Captain America says. It’s not just Earth, it’s half the universe. He and a few of the Avengers that have survived “ The Snap” as they’re all calling it, but only just a few.
Tony Stark is MIA.
His mother is gone. But he still has Ariel and they still have food and he’s not paying bills and miraculously the power is still on but it won’t be for long. Rose Hill will be too sleepy for the ones who are left and they’ll have to leave when this place turns to dust as well. He doesn’t know where they’ll go. The only other somewhat competent adult he knows that he can even entertain the thought about asking for help is fucking missing because he was last seen on a spaceship that catapulted out of orbit.
Harley remembers watching the footage from his laptop, puzzled. Tony’s afraid of space. The whole wormhole with the nuke freaked him out. He’s surprised he went back.
He supposes that’s what makes--made--no, makes, him Iron Man.
No, Harley thinks. It’s what makes him stupid.
A week goes by, then two. After three, when the panic of permanence in their situation settles and nests in the back of his brain, Ariel shoves an iPad in his face.
“Harley, look--Iron Man is back!”
And wow, look at that, he is. The newsreel shows Tony Stark and some unidentifiable, scary-looking blue lady come off some alien ship. There’s no suit, no tech, no nothing. Just the world’s most exhausted, blood-crusted man in a dusty track suit looking utterly defeated.
It’s not a good look for him.
Harley feels he should tell him so. Personally. Face to face.
He still keeps the note from The Mechanic tacked up on the garage wall. Without much courtesy to the crippling panic that’s been flipping his stomach for hours, he snaps up from the workbench and takes the note down, tossing it in the front of the shiny red mustang that was gifted to him five years ago.
“Pack your things,” Harley says shortly, looking around for anything and everything in his workshop that’s useful. “We’re leaving.”
Eleven year old Ariel looks at him like he’s crazy. “Why? Where would we go?”
Harley finishes tossing every single potato gun in his possession into the trunk. Maybe it’s excessive. Yeah definitely excessive. He starts to take them out. “You’re always begging for rides in these things and now that you’re getting one handed to you on a silver platter, you’re questioning it?”
“Uh, yeah?” She rolls her eyes. “Where are we going?”
His head is still in the trunk. “New York.”
She blinks, startling slightly when Harley carelessly tosses one of the potato guns out and it breaks on the floor. “Is this because of Iron Man?” she asks dubiously, watching as her brother empties his entire box of electromagnets in the trunk. “I know he said he did all this stuff…but you haven’t talked to him since. Who says he’ll even remember you?”
“He might not,” Harley admits begrudgingly, shutting the trunk a little too harshly. He starts throwing blankets in the back seat. “But it’s worth a shot.”
Ariel groans. “There’s no way he’ll remember you. This is pointless.”
“So is staying here.”
“...what if Mom comes back?”
“What if Dad comes back?” Harley spits back, regretting it instantly. “No, sorry, no,” he backtracks as fast as he can, before Ariel can shout or scream or cry. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just….you saw what happened. She can’t come back, not without some,” he sputters, trying to find the words as he waves his arms about, “cosmic magical power helping her. Helping everyone.”
To her credit, she doesn't seem phased by his outburst. “Sooo...like Thor?”
“Yeah, something like Thor. And where there’s Thor, there’s probably Iron Man. And all that’s in New York. So that’s where we’re going.”
“To….?”
“Help Tony.”
Ariel still doesn’t look pleased.
“Look,” he sighs. “How about you write her a note telling her where we’re going. So if there is magic and she comes back, she’ll know what's going on. Got it?”
Her posture crumples and she pouts, accepting her fate of riding fourteen hours in a car with her older brother. “Yeah, okay. Fine. God, I hate magic. Even science-magic. But definitely magic-magic.”
Harley snorts. “Me too.”
The drive is excruciating.
Harley used to think traffic was the worst part about driving. It isn’t. For the first fifty miles or so, there’s almost no one on the road. But then the carnage appears. Ariel feels the need to point out every single abandoned, dented car that’s pushed out of the road, trying to name the model and the year in the early evening darkness.
“Can you just,” he swallows uneasily as the wind whips his hair in his face. Ariel is wrinkling her nose as they pass a large, four car pile up, and doesn’t mention the stench in the air or the human hair sticking out from underneath an overturned pick-up. “...stick to navigating? And tell me when you see a sad-looking gas station.”
“You filled the car before we left,” his sister reminds him. "And the spare jugs."
“Just do it, Ariel.”
They pull over an hour later at a gas station that is decidedly not open, despite the lights being on. There’s only one car in the parking lot and Harley fears there’s nothing but a pile of ash behind the register.
He tells Ariel to wait in the car and because she’s Ariel she’s right at his heels as he steps inside. The bell rings overhead and he instinctively looks to the counter, but no one is there. The store is empty, not raided, and eerily quiet.
“Grab what you need,” Harley tells her. “As much as you can carry, honestly. Don’t know what it’s like in New York.”
She’s already stuffing cookies into her backpack. “Hey, If they still make pizza when we get there, can we get some? I heard it's good.”
"Which place?"
"Just...pizza. New York pizza."
“Oh my god, you’re ridiculous,” he mumbles as he hops over the counter. He forces himself not to look at the floor before he begins to repeatedly hit at the register.
“What are you doing?” Ariel asks. There’s half a Slim Jim in her mouth.
“Stealing?” he says, like it’s a dumb question. Because it is a dumb question. They need money.
“I know that, it’s just…” she’s suddenly in his space, shoving him aside and his foot slips on what definitely feels like dirt and he tries not to vomit.
Harley distracts himself by watching his little sister pull out a small crowbar from her backpack. “Where the hell did you get that?”
“It was in the garage,” she shrugs, wedging it into the drawer. “I wasn’t about to leave it behind. Haven’t you seen a single piece of apocalyptic media? You always need a crowbar.”
“You play too many video games,” he says, reaching over her to help break open the register. “And we’re not in an apoca--”
The register busts open with a ding, revealing the til in all it’s hundred and fifty dollar glory.
Ariel is the one that ends up pocketing the money, stuffing some of it in her back pockets, in Harley’s jacket, in the backpack. “You were saying?”
He stares around at the empty gas station and realizes that maybe it is the apocalypse.
He keeps his mouth shut.
“Do you think he brought Spider-Man back?”
Harley side-eyes Ariel, gripping the wheel a little more tightly. They’d been doing a real good job at the Quiet Game for the past two hours, only having to put up with the sounds of her eating an entire bag of potato chips. “Who?”
“Tony.” Ariel elaborates. “The videos of him fighting in New York. He was with a wizard and Spider-Man. No one knows if they all got on the spaceship.”
“A wizard.”
“I know, I know, but that’s what the Youtube comments say.” She sighs, fishing out his phone from his jacket pocket. “Magic is stupid,” she reiterates. Her face lights up when she turns his phone on and he can tell she’s surfing the web which is good. They have a signal. They have data. They just have to hold out a little longer.
Harley knows a little about Spider-Man. He popped up almost two years ago, first as some poorly dressed vigilante of Queens and then as a full-fledged looking superhero, courtesy of Tony Stark himself. Even though Spider-Man seems to deal with small crimes like robberies or using his strength to prevent car crashes, they always seem to be associated, Iron Man and Spider-Man, which in Harley’s book is good. Tony always seemed to be a bit of a loner and ever since Captain America became a war criminal and that whole story blew up in the news, he didn’t think Iron Man would be a team player ever again. But it seem he makes a few exceptions, most of them being Spider-Man.
“I dunno,” Harley finally says. “I didn’t hear anything about him in the news.” Which is true. No one knows Spider-Man’s true identity, so it’s hard to put a pin on his whereabouts. The videos don’t give much clues, not like the ones that show Iron Man running after the spaceship.
“Then he probably died,” Ariel admits woefully. “Right? I mean, he would have come back with Tony if he wasn’t dead.”
Harley shrugs. “He might not have been on the spaceship due to all the magic. You know. From the wizard. You think he knows Harry Potter?” He gasps dramatically. “Shit, you think he was Harry Potter? ”
Ariel rolls her eyes and ignores him. “I don’t think Spider-Man would let Tony on a spaceship by himself. They’re friends.”
“Eh, I don’t think Tony really has friends.”
His sister snorts in protest. “Uh, just because he didn’t want to be your friend, doesn’t mean he hasn’t got any, dummy.”
At the sound of her laughter, he takes one hand off the wheel to shove in her face.
Once she’s calmed down and threatened to shove Cheetos up his nose if he didn’t get his hands out of her face , she curls back up in her seat, eyelids heavy. “I hope Spider-Man is back in Queens.” she mumbles, already drifting off. “I want his autograph.”
“I thought you wanted Thor’s autograph,” he said, recalling their conversations over the past years concerning Avengers and favorite superheroes.
“No, I want to marry Thor. Ugh, keep up.”
The car falls silent after that and Harley is a little grateful. This whole trip is pretty ridiculous and while, yeah, it’s worth a shot, it’s a pretty….daunting shot to take. It’s making his mind race. There’s no way he can know if Tony will stay in New York with the other Avengers. Hell, he doesn’t really even know if he’s okay. All anyone’s seen is him getting off the spaceship looking half dead.
But as he listens to his sisters soft snores, he knows he has to try. Harley saved the day once before. He didn’t do much, just recharged the suit and made minor repairs, but it helped. He even managed to calm Tony down from an anxiety attack. Harley can help again. All he needs is a chance, with some adults that he can trust. For his sanity’s sake. For Ariel’s sake.
He pushes down on the gas pedal a little harder and prays that Tony and all of New York doesn’t fall apart before he gets there.