Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tony still dreamt of it.

Of the warm blood on his face mixing with the dust and smoke in the air, making his eyes water as he peered through the haze. Calling out for Peter.

He dreamt in short, rapid bursts, like his own heartbeat. Barely a flash of an image before it was replaced by another. Tony dreamt of bouncing Peter on his knee just seconds before the windows shattered and three small round things—fell into his living room.

Of looking into the random agent’s eyes as they told him his son was gone.

(You’d think he’d remember the person who broke it to him, but he didn’t. It may as well have been a stranger on the street.)

He dreamt of the heart monitor hooked up to him going crazy for a few seconds before just—stopping.

And he dreamt of the pain of waking back up, chest burning, doctors swarming around him like dust mites in sunlight.

This was usually where his dreams took a detour from memory. In his dreams, he would be staring with a detached, reckless interest at the flat green line, and then Pepper would come storming in, blood on her teeth, her eyes rolling in her skull. Looking for all she was worth like something out of a horror movie.

“How could you?” She’d wail. “You lost our baby! You lost my son!”

(This was not what actually happened. In reality, Pepper didn’t hear the news until well after an hour had passed since Peter was taken, as she was asleep on a plane.)

In his dreams, he never looked for his son. Depression and guilt ate away at him until he couldn’t even get out of bed. Tony wasted away into a shriveled corpse that weighed a thousand pounds, staring at the ceiling of his room, listening to the world turn.

In his dreams, Pepper abandoned him. The loss of her son coupled with the blame on her husband tipped her over the edge of sanity, and she spent her days shuffling down the street with teeth cracked from holding back her sobs, clutching a picture of Peter, waving it in the faces of strangers. Looking for all she was worth like an old witch from a fairy tale.

In his dreams, Peter disappeared.

And he was never seen again.

Sometimes, though, he had good dreams. The dreams that blended fantasy with memory. The ones tinted with gold, with a soundtrack of Pepper singing sweet lullabies to lure Peter into sleep.

Those dreams hurt the worst.

He would be changing Peter’s diaper, or speaking to him in Italian, laughing when Peter tried to parrot it, or watching as Peter navigated the lab, dragging his favorite stuffed animal along.

(They could never get him to give up that damn lion. Pepper boxed it away and put it in storage with the rest of Peter’s things. Sometimes, on bad days, one of them could be found amongst dusty boxes holding it to their chest.)

In those dreams, Pepper would be right next to him, hand curled into his, her lips soft on his cheek, her eyes gentle when they locked with Tony’s over Peter’s head. She would press her chin into Tony’s shoulder while Peter was reading a book miles above his age group and playfully say, “He gets his brains from you.”

”Let’s hope he gets his personality from you,” Tony would reply.

Sometimes, he would wake up and not even know it was a dream for a few seconds. He would wake up and his love for Pepper and Peter would be so heavy in his chest that it was like a physical weight. He would feel so blessed to have such a life. To have his soulmate by his side and his son on his hip.

But reality always came back in. Like a cancer.

Pepper was still by his side through thick and thin, but there was something amiss in her eyes. Something missing and filled at the same time.

The abduction had taken something out of her, a core part of her, and the years passing replaced it with a cheap replica.

And Peter . . . was still gone.

Peter was always gone.

Then the Ten Rings happened, and Tony became Iron Man. Suddenly, he could distract himself, if only on the surface. He immersed himself in it, in getting smarter, working longer, doing ITALICS-good.-ITALICS He immersed himself in insuring Pepper’s safety, no matter the cost.

The Avengers were . . . both the worst and the best thing that ever happened to him. He found companionship and condemnation all at once, too quickly for him to process. And every time his past was brought up—be it by villains, fans, agents or old acquaintances—he had to fucking stand there and watch as their faces flashed with sympathy or sadness or judgement or pretentiousness, and every time, he wanted to wave his hands in the air and scream, “Hellooo! I’m not doing that anymore! Yes, I accidentally sold weapons to terrorists! Yes, my son is gone! Shit happens!”

But Pepper was still there. Sweet, perfect Pepper. Who held Tony when he woke up screaming, crying, unable to breathe, or convinced he knew exactly where Peter was and couldn’t believe it took us so long to think of this, it’s so obvious, Pepper!

Tony tried to make things easier on her. It wasn’t easy being married to him. He held her just as tightly when she had her own nightmares, pressed kisses into her hair when she cried into his chest, tried to take as much stress off her as he possibly could, but Pepper had a habit of holding all her rotten parts real close to her chest.

The internet could talk for days about how selfless Tony was, but they never mentioned his wife. They never mentioned how she still got out of bed every damn day, how she held all of her stress and pain in a little ball in her gut, how she was desperate to control everything, anything, in an attempt to feel some semblance of safety again.

When Peter was taken, they both spiraled. Just in different ways.

Tony was like a tornado, spinning wider and faster and sucking up everything in his path, trying to latch onto something only to break it, leaving a path of ruined places and people behind him, until one day he would go too fast and too big and would just explode, decimating anything he had yet to ruin.

Pepper was the opposite, but the same. She spiraled tighter and tighter and higher and higher, retreating into herself more and more until she was nothing but a thousand mile long string, tense enough to snap at any moment, refusing to go near anyone else in fear of pulling them into her vacuum of fear and sadness. Until one day she would just cease to exist; would get so thin that nobody would even see her, would stretch herself so much that she would just—disappear. It would be like she wasn’t even there at all.

That must be why they were perfect for each other.

He could throw himself into searching and inventing as much as he wanted, but it didn’t change the fact that Peter had been taken.

It didn’t change the fact that they had no clue who had done it.

Or if he was still alive.

Peter.

Their son.

Pepper’s fingers dug into Tony’s shoulder, shaking him awake. He came to consciousness like a man out of water, shaking and sputtering.

“Tony,” she said, voice hoarse with sleep. “Tony. Wake up. S’not real. You’re dreaming.”

He grabbed her wrist, tugging until she was leaning over him, a total eclipse of his nightmares. Her freckles seemed to dance on the bridge of her nose, but then he blinked a few times and they settled down. “M’sorry. Skipped the pills tonight. Sorry.”

Pepper nodded blearily, already shushing him. “It’s alright.” She kissed his temple, smelling of rose water and fresh linens. “Don’t worry. It’s fine.”

“What time s’it?” Tony shifted around until he could hold his arms out, a little helplessly, for Pepper to collapse into. The nightmare was already slipping through his mind like sand in an hourglass, pooling at the bottom so the next time he fell asleep it could be turned over and start all over again.

“Dunno. Either very late or very early. Definitely one or the other.”

The ghost of a smile haunted his lips before he murmured, “Did I wake you?” His eyes slid shut, surrendering to the comfort her voice provided.

“Don’t worry about it, Tones. Go back to sleep.” Pepper placed a feather-light kiss on his collarbone. She was already half asleep. Her arms wrapped around his waist, nails gently scratching at his back over his old, thin t-shirt with holes in the hem.

This was their routine. By the time either of them woke up, it would be nearly forgotten, just another memory amongst all the others, a single grain of sand being dropped on a beach.

Chapter Text

Peter wasn’t in the plane when it crashed, but it didn’t stop him from dreaming of the deaths of Mary and Richard Parker.

The dreams were weird and vivid and realistic, in the way that dreams made perfect sense despite being impossible.

His dream—nightmare—of the plane crash never varied.

It would open on the site of the crash, which was in the middle of the desert—despite it actually landing in the ocean—with debris littering the sand. The place was there, still mostly intact despite the desert being totally trashed.

There was a big, gaping hole in the side of the plane, which passengers began to surge through, falling out one after another. And Peter was just . . . standing there. Feet buried in the sand. Watching them pass.

He was four when they died, but in his dreams he was always around six or seven. He was also always wearing his favorite pair of pajamas at that age, which had little patterns of Thor’s hammer against a light blue background.

So Peter would be standing there, wondering why he couldn’t move, watching all these strangers flood out of the plane, and it would occurs to him that there were way too many people. Not just as in too many survivors, but people. Too many people who could plausibly fill up the plane, and they were still coming.

Once Peter noticed the first weird thing, he started to notice all the other weird things.

Like how not a single one of them look injured or ruffled.

And how every single one of them wore an impeccably tailored pilot’s uniform.

And how none of them spoke.

So he was standing there, watching the passengers gush from the plane like blood from a wound, and he would finally think, Where’s mom and dad?

All this worry and anxiety would start to fill up Peter’s lungs like cement, and he was suddenly positive that he would never find his mom and dad again, that he would be lost, untethered, floating through the world with nothing to hold onto, that the plane had stolen them from him.

As a boy of six or seven years old, this was greatly upsetting.

Peter started searching the crowd, which was pressing in tighter and tighter with each passing second, and tried to find his parents.

The thing is, Peter never really knew what his parents looked like. He saw a couple of photos around the house growing up, but Aunt May took them all down before he got old enough to actually see them. He had a vague picture in his head—brown hair and bright teeth.

So he was standing there, looking for his parents when he didn’t even know what they looked like, unable to move, and the passengers just kept coming. They were crowding him so much, pressing in and in and knocking him around and for whatever weird nightmare reason, he still couldn’t move.

Suddenly, magically, he saw them. He knew it was them; he knew it in the way you just knew things in dreams. It was barely a glimpse, but it enough. Just a flash of brown hair in a sea of brown hair.

He tried to move, but the crowd was too tight, and he was only elbow-height. He tried to speak, but there was a frog in his throat, and every time he opened his mouth it would croak over his words.

(At the time, the frog in his throat seemed like the least of his worries.)

Peter had no choice but to stand there and watch his parents come in and out of focus. They were pushing through the crowd, too, and despite seeing their mouths move, there was no noise from them either.

Just three mute people in a sea of chattering people.

When they came closer, he could finally see what they were wearing. Their faces were still kind of blurry, but he could see their clothes perfectly well. His dad was wearing an old t-shirt that had a band logo over the front and holes in the hem. His mother was wearing a light blue blazer and pencil skirt, pretty impractical for the desert, but she wore it gracefully.

So he was standing there, watching his parents get painstakingly closer without ever actually seeing him, croaking, getting elbowed in the head every five seconds, and still in those fucking Thor pajamas.

The weirdest part was that as they came closer, he got more afraid. At first, he thought it was fear of them not seeing him, but after he had to live through the dream a thousand times, he realized that wasn’t it. Peter never could identify the type of fear it truly was, but it wasn’t a regular, childlike fear. It was a deep fear, skin of the bones fear, something-important-happened-to-make-me-scared-of-this fear.

The dream always ended the second he locked eyes with his father.

He usually woke up crying.

The child therapist May had gotten for him always said the same thing when it was brought up: trauma from losing his parents so young was manifesting through his subconscious.

No shit.

The nightmare wasn’t the only recurring dream he had growing up, though it did fall away as he got older and let go of the fear that he had somehow killed his parents.

He had a nicer dream.

In the second dream, he could never actually see anything. It felt like he was floating in water. It felt like he didn’t even have a body. He saw the solar system floating around him. Stars swam past his field of vision, small as butterflies. The planets bobbed like rubber ducks in a bath, moving leisurely around him. Mercury went over his head and floated off to bump into Earth.

In the background, a woman was singing. He couldn’t make out the words, it was too quiet—it sorta sounded like someone on the radio. It was . . . soothing. Soothing in a way that a disembodied voice had no right to be. She sounded like she was singing in a different language. The voice would stop, and a man’s voice would say something, undoubtedly speaking in English, but still too faint to know for sure what he was saying. The woman replied, then went silent. The man took over singing, definitely the same song, still in a different language, still indistinguishable.

The dream felt like an acid trip; it always left Peter feeling odd when he woke up. Like his skin had been swapped out for a cheap replica. It, too, eventually stopped.

He never told Aunt May about it.

Peter rubbed his eyes, a yawn splitting his jaw into two, three, four pieces. The letters in his Algebra notebook danced across the page. The numbers on his alarm clock told him it was nearing four am. His sleep schedule was shot to hell under the workload of both Spider-Manning daily and keeping up with school; Peter hadn’t gotten a full night’s rest in months. He basically lived off energy drinks and stabbing himself in the thigh with a pencil to stay awake.

He tried to finish the equation he was working on, but his pen merely scratched against the paper. Out of ink.

A quiet groan escaped him. Peter shoved the pen back into his pencil holder cup and ran his fingers through the other ones crammed in there. He knew them all to be either out of ink or lead as well.

“Shit,” he muttered. He looked around his room, but there weren’t any surprise packs of pencils lying around.

Peter pushed his chair back a bit and started opening the drawers in his desk.

The first one was filled with loose leaf paper, scissors, candy wrappers, and a rubber band ball that he took out and began rolling around on the desk with one hand.

Second drawer was markers, glue sticks, random bracelets accumulated through the years, and some old school projects from elementary.

The third drawer held the holy grail: loose pencils galore, not even sharpened yet. Peter reached in to grab a handful, but his eye was caught by a flash of blue and yellow. There was a small piece of paper folded into a triangle the length of his thumb. It had a yellow spot on it, with a dark blue background. He grabbed it on a whim and kicked the drawer shut.

The paper felt like plastic, in the way that papers drawn on with crayon and then left in a drawer for a few years always felt a bit like plastic. He must have shoved it in there when he first got the desk; when he was putting all his loose papers away.

Peter dumped the handful of pencils on his still open notebook, ignoring them when some rolled off, and tried to find the edge of the paper to unfold it. Sure, he could be focusing on the homework that he’s been putting off for the last week, but why do that when he had found treasure?

Leaning on the back two legs of his chair, Peter propped a foot on the edge of his desk. The paper had been folded for so long that even when he undid the fold, it still closed in on itself like a Venus flytrap. He had to hold it open by both sides to make sure it didn’t revert back into the triangle.

Oh, this brings back memories, he thought. On the paper, in childish fashion, he had drawn the solar system against a blue and green—an attempt at a galaxy—background. Sort of. It was all out of order, the planets weren’t in their proper places. The yellow spot Peter had seen was one of the stars he had drawn.

(The ones that swam by like butterflies.)

It was almost eerie, in the way that seeing something you had obviously put a lot of time and effort into a long time ago but now didn’t care that much about was almost eerie.

He nostalgically traced one of the planets—Mars, he was pretty sure. Peter used to draw and redraw that dream a thousand times, trying to get the exact feeling right.

The first dream—the nightmare—he had never drawn. Why would he want to bring that into reality?

Peter smiled a bit. He almost missed the space dreams. He wondered why they ever went away; then why he had them in the first place.

The only odd thing about this particular drawing was that, in the dead center, there was a crude making of two people holding hands. The smile fell. He never remembered anyone else in his dreams, unless you counted the voices, but he didn’t. Sometimes it felt like  he wasn’t even in the dreams.

The two people were male and female. The male had dark hair, and going back the black scribble across the lower half of his face, also a beard. The female had hair drawn in two different colors, one pink and one yellow. The pink was drawn over the yellow. They both had dopey little smiles drawn with a red crayon.

I must have put a lot of effort into this, he thought. It wasn’t the lazy scribble of a bored toddler, it was the careful effort of someone trying very hard to draw a very specific person.

But who?

Peter was too tired to think that much of it. His eyes were burning, his homework could be finished at breakfast, and his lamp was probably going to burn out at any second. He didn’t have the time or energy to analyze a childhood drawing.

Refolding the paper, Peter picked up the ball of rubber bands and lifted up one of the top ones. He tucked the triangle into it and tossed the whole ball into his shoe, where he would find it later.

The sides of his throat rubbed each other when he swallowed. He closed his notebook and put it on top of the pile next to him. The water was stale and warm, but he still chugged half the bottle he had gotten as an afterthought to studying.

Peter stood up and stretched, joints popping satisfactorily in his back and neck. He grabbed the hem of his sweater and peeled it off, dumping it onto the dirty laundry pile by the foot of his bed. He shimmied out of his pants and decided to sleep in just his undershirt and boxers, too lazy to put on real pajamas.

His twin bed was old and the springs sometimes poked him when he slept, but Peter swore there was nothing in the world more comfortable in that moment. He flopped onto his stomach and buried his face in the pillows. His room was cramped enough that he could turn off the lamp without getting up.

When he fell asleep, he dreamt of Algebra equations dancing in a ballroom and nothing more.

Chapter Text

God, his mask stunk. It would have stunk even if he didn’t have the enhanced senses that allowed him to smell every last alleyway and dumpster he had taken it through. When was the last time he washed it?

Given that May did most of the laundry—she was a total control freak about mixing whites and colors—it was extremely difficult for him to get away with doing a load of his own. Sometimes he would say he was going to Ned’s house and then sneak off to a laundromat, but he didn’t like to do that because May always saw right through him when he lied.

But if Aunt May can see right through you, then how do you get away with climbing out of the window every night and assisting the citizens of Queens wearing old sweatpants, you ask?

Good question. He didn’t lie—but he didn’t tell the truth either.

Like tonight. He had told Aunt May he was going to Ned’s house—and he did! For about five minutes. To drop off his backpack.

And now he was sitting on the ledge of a roof, watching the traffic crawl down the road. He had a bag of chips between his legs and the mask pulled up around his nose.

Work was slow. Peter had finished his homework during lunch that day, and all his chores could be finished in thirty minutes. Plus, New York at five in the afternoon wasn’t really that dangerous. Things would probably kick up around seven or eight.

Until then. . . .

Peter tensed up, eyes catching on a suspicious looking individual. He was wearing a ratty old hoodie with his hands shoved deep in the pockets, and kept on glancing over his shoulder every couple of seconds. Now, Peter didn’t usually like to stereotype, but this guy made his Spidey senses whisper danger in his ear.

He mirrored the man’s path down the street from up on his ledge. When Peter reached the end of the building, he jumped effortlessly to the next building, barely even glancing at the other roof before jumping.

“Hello, Mr. Hoodie,” he whispered. Peter crawled onto the side of the building, so that the shadows covered him.

The man looked over his shoulder one more time before slowing down and walking into an alley (never a good sign).

In the alley, the stranger went to the farthest wall and slouched against it, pulling out a phone. He seemed to be texting someone, maybe his buyer? Or his dealer. Was he buying or selling the drugs? His pale wrists were a bright contrast against his black hoodie. From this angle, Peter could see most of his face now; he looked like he was in his late twenties, with a weak blond goatee.

Pro tip, Mr. Hoodie: If you’re going to look like a drug dealer, maybe don’t dress like one! Peter mentally rolled his eyes and rounded the corner, sticking close to the top.

Mr. Hoodie started pacing. He dragged a hand over his jaw, looking like every cliché criminal to ever criminal in the history of criminal.

Nerves—both excitement and anxiety—fizzed in Peter’s veins. His Spidey senses told him that this was a bigger deal than most of his busts. Spider-Man dealt almost exclusively in petty crimes: men following girls down streets, teenagers stealing cigarettes from gas stations, maybe an occasional robbery at knife-point. This whole situation screamed police, and yet here he was, about to apprehend him single-handedly.

He wanted to drop down there and web him up immediately, but he knew there had to be another person coming.

Please be a drug deal, please be a drug deal, he prayed. If Spider-Man was cited as taking out an actual drug dealer, it would get the cops off his ass. Right now, he had to wait on the walls for the cops to show up and arrest his catches, otherwise, if they saw him, they would keep on trying to bring him in as well. Something about being a ‘wall sticking vigilante’ who ‘needs to stop hanging people from street lamps’ and ‘needs to answer a couple questions’ and has to ‘get off the goddamn roof right this second’. If he stopped a drug deal in its tracks, they might finally take him seriously as a crime-stopper!

After waiting with bated breath for around ten minutes, a new guy walked into the alley. Instead of a hoodie, he had a baseball cap on to hide his face. He was taller than the original man, with a navy blue shirt. Curly red hair peeked out of the hat.

For a moment, the two were silent. Sizing each other up. The hair on the back of Peter’s neck stood up.

“Fifty bucks, right?” Asked the new guy.

The first one nodded. “Anyone follow you?”

“Nah.” Mr. Blue Shirt pulled some money out of his pocket and passed it to Mr. Hoodie.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Peter crawled farther down the wall, muscles tensing in preparation to spring.

Mr. Hoodie took the money, but grabbed Mr. Blue Shirt’s wrist and yanked him closer. “No funny business?” His voice sounded like he had already got the guy, like he was waiting for him to perjure himself.

Mr. Blue Shirt yanked his hand back defensively. “No funny business, man. Just gimme the stuff.”

Please be crack, please be crack, please be crack. . . .

The first guy pulled out a small bag of white powder.

Yes!

Without skipping a beat, Peter leapt off the side of the building and landed behind the one buying. “Hey, guys. Ran outta sugar?”

Mr. Blue Shirt whirled around. He had a chance to see angry green eyes before his Spidey senses told him to duck. He dropped to one knee and webbed the man’s flying fist to the wall.

Seconds before the dealer fled the alley, Peter webbed his hoodie and yanked it towards himself, flinging the dealer across the alley until he landed on some trash cans against the far wall. With him out of service for the time being, he turned to the one buying and said, “How’s it going, dude? Nice day for a walk, right?”

“You don’t know what’s going on here, kid,” the man said through gritted teeth. His hair was sticking to his forehead with sweat, which was odd, considering he had barely done anything. Maybe he was nervous—buying drugs can be pretty nerve wracking.

“Sure, I do!” Peter grabbed his free hand and webbed it to the wall as well.

He turned and shot a web at the dealer, trapping him in the alley corner by his foot. Peter backed up a few steps, looking between the two dramatically. Gasping, he pointed at the buyer and said, “Wait a second! You aren’t borrowing a cup of sugar at all!”

The dealer groaned and tried to unstick his foot. “You fuckin’ freak,” he snapped. “Get me outta here!”

“And leave such a golden opportunity to catch a drug dealer? Didn’t you go to elementary school? Hugs, not drugs.”

He prowled closer to the dealer, wanting to get a better shot at his wrists to pin them to the wall.

Behind you! Peter spun, searching for any more threats. Who else could show up?

Of corse, right as he thought that, two police officers ran into the alley.

“Hands where I can see ‘em,” ordered the one on the left, hand resting on the handle of his gun.

Peter backed up on instinct. He hoped his voice didn’t sound as shaky to them as it did to him when he said, “I didn’t do anything! They—it’s a drug deal!”

The second police officer pulled his gun out but kept it aimed at the ground. Nevertheless, Peter’s stomach jumped at the sight. What the hell is going on? Can’t they see that I’m helping them?!

Suddenly, his mouth had gotten very dry. He stumbled back even more. A cold sweat broke out on his neck. When he tried to speak, nothing could come out.

“Hands! Now!” The officer stalked closer, eyes darting between Peter to the buyer like a ping pong ball.

“I . . . I don’t—I was just stopping the deal. . . .” He felt a sudden, childish urge to cry. Couldn’t they see that he was helping them? Why didn’t they just let him do his thing?

“Congratulations, kid,” the one with the gun drawn said. He went over to the buyer and started examining the webs. “You just ruined a three month long undercover operation that cost our department thousands of dollars.”

Undercover operation? Peter’s head started buzzing. He felt sick in a way he hadn’t since before the spider bite. A train of curses that would make Aunt May smack him upside the head ran through his mind. He backed up once more, trying to think of something to defend himself, but there wasn’t—

“Get back!” The first police officer suddenly pulled his gun and pointed it straight at Peter.

“I didn’t do anything!” His hands flew to the air.

Wrong move.

Barely two seconds after the man had pulled his gun, there was such an intense wave of RUN!!! that he flinched. He saw the man’s eyes widening, the buyer lunging uselessly against the webs, and the second cop taking a shooting stance, all in the span of a second.

And then he got stabbed.

The dealer twisted the knife in. He yelled something at the police. Peter couldn’t hear; his ears had bottomed out. There was only a low thrumming noise.

On his right side, he felt the blood before he truly felt the pain. For an embarrassing moment, he thought he had peed his pants. Then he realized the warmth was not coming from his pants but, in fact, from a stab wound.

Ow, he thought. Then: Fucking OW!

His body took over for him—Peter twisted in place and grabbed the dealer’s wrist, twisting it away from his ribs. The dealer hissed in pain and dropped the knife. His free arm wrapped clumsily around his neck, perhaps attempting to choke him. It didn’t work out very well.

Blood, he thought while trying to wrestle out of the dealer’ grip without breaking his arm. Blood is bad. Gotta stop the blood.

The first police officer was shouting again, steadily moving forward. “Both of you, on the ground, now!”

Why are you yelling at me? I pretty obviously didn’t do anything! Except ruin the entire operation, but that’s a harmless mistake!

Peter managed to slip out of the man’s grasp. That presented a problem: Behind him was an enraged drug dealer, now with a sprained wrist, and in front of him was an enraged police officer with his gun drawn. Both of them had no qualms about getting rough with Peter—or rather, Spider-Man.

Forwards or backwards, punk, where you gonna go?

The answer: up.

He lunged to the side, scrambling up the brick wall like a cockroach. His wound screamed at him to stop, and his Spidey senses were so loud and unrelenting that they were basically white noise in the background of his mind.

Beneath him, he heard the second police officer mutter, “What the hell?”

Up and up and up some more, blood oozing out of the knife wound, enhanced healing working overtime to stitch up the hole.

“Get back down here!” Ordered the first police officer. It didn’t sound as strong as the previous times—perhaps he was busy restraining the dealer. Maybe he just didn’t care that much.

At the top of the building, Peter looked down and yelled, “Sorry! Good luck with the drugs!” He hoisted himself over the ledge and rolled onto his back. A low groan escaped his lips. The pain was finally kicking in—a pulsing knot of holyfuckingshitIjustgotstabbed that curled his toes.

May’s gonna kill me, he thought miserably. Peter placed a hand over the wound. The warm blood soaked his gloves. His mask was suffocating him, gross and moist from his sweat.

Damning the consequences, Peter peeled off the mask. He gasped in long, rattling breaths of fresh air. He had never gotten stabbed before. Punched, kicked, and bitten, sure, but never stabbed.

It sucked.

He counted to three, then webbed the stab wound. It would have to do as a bandage until he got home. A few meager tears leaked from his eyes. Peter grabbed his mask and put it back on, even though there wasn’t anyone there to see him crying. Maybe . . . he should just call it a night.

Officer Jake Perkins watched the Spider-Man disappear over the building, his limbs unnaturally quick. A shudder worked its way up his spine. “Freaky little bastard,” he muttered, holstering his gun. “Who the hell does he think he is?”

Charlie Baker, his partner, rolled his eyes and moved past him, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. He said, “See if you can get Hall out of those webs,” and handcuffed the fuming dealer, reciting the Miranda Rights robotically.

Perkins approached with caution. “You alright?” He asked.

Mark Hall, their undercover cop, glared daggers. “The operation is blown, the bug got away, and I’m stuck to a wall. Do I look alright?”

“You do not look alright.” Perkins grabbed his switchblade and began the arduous process of cutting away the web. As pathetic as it was, it wasn’t his first time having to cut a fellow cop out of one of Spider-Man’s traps.

Fucking stupid, he thought. The only reason that guy keeps getting away is because of his webs. Take those away and what is he? A bug. And bugs get squished.

“Watch it!” Hall barked. Perkin’s knife had gotten dangerously close to slicing open his wrist.

He apologized and moved to the next arm.

Baker walked by them, now leading the drug dealer—a high school dropout by the name of Darwin Kennedy—to their car parked a half block away. “I’m gonna put him in the car,” he told them. “You got this covered?”

“Yeah. We’ll catch up with you in a bit.” Perkin’s knife got stuck in the webbing. He tensed and yanked it out as hard as he could, nearly elbowing Darwin in the process.

“Hey, you got a bag on you?” Baker asked suddenly, pausing at the lip of the alley.

Perkins raised an eyebrow. “Maybe. Why?”

Baker shrugged, a shit-eating grin on his face. “Well Mr. Kennedy over here stabbed Spider-Brat.”

“And?”

“Quite a bit of blood got on that knife. Might be the first bit of DNA we have from him. Think we can run it through the system, see if anything comes up?”

He looked over at the back of the alley and—indeed, there was the bloody knife in question, discarded innocently on the ground. Jake Perkins grinned for the first time that night. “Charlie, you beautiful bastard. Put him in holding. Take Hall, too,” he added as he finally worked the man’s other wrist free. “I’m gonna bag it and take it to forensics.”

Hall punched him in the shoulder as he passed. “Just don’t forget to log it in evidence. See you tomorrow?”

“That’ll do,” he confirmed. Perkins pulled an evidence bag out of his pocket. He turned it inside out to grab the knife without getting his fingerprints on it. The blood had just barely dried on the blade when he closed it. The officer held it up to the light, admiring the way the blood glittered in the setting sun.

First step to getting rid of an infestation: identify your parasite.

Tony rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, gritting his teeth. It was nearing one in the morning, and while that wasn’t unusual for him, he had taken two sleeping pills prescribed to him by his therapist.

He took them at eight.

Which meant he had been fighting the effects of the pills for the last five or so hours.

Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered to do anything at all besides work. Why pretend like he had a place outside of the lab? Pepper was the CEO. So why was he still trying to protect his image? He didn’t even want an image. He just wanted to be the guy behind the curtain, pushing out new designs day and night.

Stop your moping and go to bed, he told himself sternly. Tony closed the sketchbook he had been working in and shoved it to the corner of the desk. Truth was, he had half a mind to pass out on the desk right then and there, but—

A nasty voice in his head whispered: But Pepper thinks you’re doing so well, right? You’re hiding it so well.

The chair fell over when he shot out of it. Tony stepped over it, deciding to pick it up tomorrow. In the corner, DUM-E was making a pyramid out of old Iron Man scraps. Chances are the robot would knock it over on accident at three in the morning and wake up everyone in New York. Tony ignored that as well.

Rain hit the windows softly. A symphony, and he the only dancer. A Struggle To Fall Awake, A Minor, and one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. . . .

“I’ve been awake for too damn long.” Tony groaned and cracked his neck.

“Agreed,” FRIDAY said out of nowhere. “But I’m afraid what I’m going to tell you will keep you up even longer.”

He groaned and threw his head back. “What have I said about telling me depressing shit before I’ve had my coffee?”

“Not to. But I’m programmed to on override code P.R.P.S.”

Tony’s ears started ringing. When he spoke, his voice was dry and rough as gravel. “What did you just say?”

“I’m programmed to ignore any and all silencing commands on override code P.R.P.S.”

P.R.P.S. It was odd hearing it by its abbreviation. It was odd hearing it at all, especially from FRIDAY, but whenever Tony spoke about that particular override code, he always pronounced it like PERPS.

PERPS. P.R.P.S 

Peter Rhodey Potts-Stark.

Chapter Text

Some time earlier . . .

When Sunny Simmons moved from Tennessee to New York to pursue her career in forensic science, she pictured getting the front page in the New York Times for her critical role in solving a grisly murder, bringing killers to justice, and having a hot guy fall madly in love with her for being such a smart and accomplished scientist.

But it was mainly just drinking lots of coffee and then looking at gross body fluids under microscopes.

And since she was a newbie, she had to work the night shift, under the sleeping eye of one sixty year old Mark Justice. Literally sleeping; he passed out at his desk every time she showed up. Working the night shift meant she had almost no time to make new friends, interact with those new friends, or be a participating member of society at all.

So instead of getting the front page, she got a flipped sleeping schedule and the nickname Moony from her superiors—as both a play on her name, and a hurtful observation of the bags under her eyes.

Sunny watched the crummy old coffee maker slowly fill her jumbo sized mug. If I were in charge, she thought, the first thing I would do is give every single department a state-of-the-line coffee maker. Or an espresso machine. Or both.

From somewhere in the lab behind her, Mark let out a snore.

She leaned against the counter and drummed her nails impatiently. Despite being on the night shift for over six months, she was still struggling with going through the whole night without a few heavy doses of caffeine. Before she moved to New York, she basically only drank sweet tea, and she definitely didn’t drink coffee. Her mom said it could stunt your growth. Now, she was going through five or six cups a night.

At least Mark splurged on creamer—she couldn’t stand the taste of black coffee. Sunny grabbed her mug and poured a generous amount of creamer in it, watching it curl and puff like an explosion in the cup. In went sugar, stirring went the spoon.

God, her work was boring. On a good day, she got to identify some drunk John Doe by his urine. On a bad day . . . well, she got to listen to Mark snore while she made her coffee.

She carefully brought her coffee back to her desk, walking slow so as not to spill. Sunny had spilled freshly brewed coffee on herself too many times to count. Also, it was a huge pain in the butt to get out of her coat.

Her desk chair was old and creaky. She was pretty sure Mark had gotten it out of a dumpster when he heard that he was getting a new coworker. It perpetually smelled of lettuce.

She lifted her mug to her lips, taking a moment to close her eyes and breathe in the fumes, her muscles relaxing one by—

“Simmons!”

“Hell!” Sunny cursed when the scalding drink burned her mouth from her jumping in shock. She hastily put the cup on her desk and grabbed a tissue, dabbing at the burning spots with tears in her eyes. When she spun in her chair to see the intruder, there stood Officer Jake Perkins in the doorway. “Officer! What—what are you doing here?”

She stood, wary. Officer Perkins had a bit of a reputation around the precinct for being an asshole with control issues. One time he had yelled at her for a solid ten minutes for sending some DNA results to his partner instead of him.

He walked further in. “I need you to test some blood and see if we have it on record. Can you do that?”

After a brief pause where she registered that, Sunny grinned and started tying her hair up. “Yeah! Yes, I can totally do that. Where’s the blood?”

“Here,” he grunted, presenting a bag with a knife in it. “Try and keep it on the down-low.”

Okay, like that isn’t shifty at all. She took the bag and set it on her desk. “Well, there goes my next Twitter post,” she joked.

Officer Perkins gave her a flat stare.

“Tough crowd.” Sunny grabbed a pair of gloves and put them on. “I will get right on this, Officer. The results should be here in a day or two.”

“Make it a handful of hours,” he ordered. His blue eyes pinned her like a butterfly on a cork board.

She shifted from foot to foot. Nerves wrestled like snakes in her belly. “I. . . . Um, all due respect, sir, but that isn’t possible.”

The cop took a step closer—not like he was trying to intimidate her, but like he was reminding her of who was in charge. “Use the SAFE.”

“The SAFE? Officer, I’m not allowed to use that—I mean, it’s only for emergencies, isn’t it?”

“Then consider this an emergency.” Officer Jake Perkins turned and started to walk out. “I’ll be back at seven to pick up the results. Don’t email them.”

Seven. Her shift ended at five. She groaned internally. On the outside, she forced a smile and said, “See you then, Officer Perkins.”

He didn’t respond. Merely left the lab, taking all the joy in it with him.

As soon as his footsteps faded out of earshot, Sunny gripped the sides of her face and screamed silently. The SAFE was only for emergency cases—which this decidedly was not. Technically, she had to listen to him, but she was also technically not supposed to use it unless Mark approved it.

But Mark was asleep. And hadn’t even stirred the entire conversation.

And Officer Perkins was pretty high up on the totem pole, according to the janitor. Maybe, if she did a really good job, he could put in a good word to her superiors. This could be her shot out of the night shift!

Resolved, Sunny grabbed the knife and took it to the SAFE.

SAFE stood for Science Assisting Forensic Emergent. It did the same thing regular DNA testing did, only it sped it up and automatically ran the results through the police database to see if there were any matches. It was a very important piece of equipment, and usually only used in extreme cases: serial killers, bomb threats, stuff only the day shift got to work on.

From what little there was known about it online, Tony Stark had invented it shortly after his son was taken. It supposedly sent the results straight to the FBI if it got a match with a big-time criminal. Almost every forensic lab in Eastern America had a SAFE, and rumor has it that Stark was working on installing it nationwide.

Sunny had never actually used it before. But luckily for her, Mark kept the instructions right by the machine. It worked by taking a sample of whatever you were trying to get the DNA of—in this case, the blood on the knife—and putting it in a small bowl built into the machine. Then you slid it in, pressed a few fancy buttons, and got your results in a few hours time.

Normal DNA tests could take anywhere from a few days to twelve weeks to get your results.

I wonder who he’s trying to find, Sunny mused, scraping the dried blood into the small bowl with a Q-Tip. Must be pretty important.

The SAFE buzzed, which, according to the instructions, meant that the process had started. All she had to do now was wait.

By the time her results showed up, it was nearly one. Back home, that would’ve made her go immediately to bed, but now it only made her sigh and sip her coffee.

The buzzing machine went up in pitch, signaling its finish. Sunny eagerly got up and walked over to the SAFE. It had a screen attached to it that would show the results before it printed them out. However, when the buzzing stopped, nothing showed up on the screen.

She frowned. Her stomach twisted uneasily.

The screen flashed—white, then black, then green, then black again. The kind of black that only meant one thing: something was fucked.

“No!” She whisper-yelled. “No, no, please don’t do this!” She started hitting random buttons, desperate for something to happen.

Mark let out a snort. Sunny froze, shoulders hunched, sweat falling down her temple.

He continued snoring.

“Please, please, please,” she murmured like a prayer, her heart beating out of her chest. “Please!”

It was still not responding.

Oh, my god. I’m going to lose my job. I’m going to lose my apartment. I’m going to lose any reputation I have. Sweet Mary and Joseph.

Pathetic tears threatened the back of her eyes. Backing up a few paces, she pressed the heels of her hands to her eyelids. “Think,” she told herself, “just think.”

Okay. Okay, so I used the SAFE, which I wasn’t supposed to do. But I only used it because Officer Perkins told me to! Oh, shoot, what will Officer Perkins say when he finds out what happened?

She stuffed her knuckles in her mouth and screamed around them. Sunny Simmons, forensic scientist from Tennessee, was well and truly screwed.

A bubble of anger exploded in her chest. She lunged forward and smacked the top of the machine with an open hand. The noise echoed through the room, making Mark blearily lift his head from his desk and ask, “Whas goin’ on?”

She froze in place again, eyes wide. “Nothing! Go back to sleep!”

Her boss rubbed his face a bit, yawned, nodded, adjusted his jacket, then promptly passed out again.

Sunny backed away from the machine. She grabbed the end of her ponytail and yanked, trying to make herself focus. She returned to her desk and sank into her seat like it was a hot bath. Her knees were like jelly.

She was going to get her front page, alright:

Bumbling Forensic Scientist Destroys Multi-Million Dollar DNA Scanner.

What would her mother say? Oh, she knew exactly what her mother would say. “Sunny Violet Simmons, I told you not to go to New York, but did you listen? No, you did not, and now look where you are!”

What if she went to jail?

Sunny grabbed her coffee and gulped it all down, despite it being cold. No, she wouldn’t go to jail. She had worked too damn hard to get where she was to have it all thrown away because of a simple mistake. This is all Officer Perkins’s fault, she thought bitterly. He shouldn’t have asked me to use the SAFE without a good reason. I’m not going down for this!

She put her head in her hands. The beginnings of a headache teased her into gritting her teeth. A plan. She needed a plan.

How often did people even use the SAFE, anyways? She could easily blame it on one of the day shifters. Except for the fact that there was at least three cameras in the lab. And there were enough workers that they could all easily provide alibis for each other. And she didn’t have the heart to do that to them.

As she sat there and sulked, an idea suddenly occurred to her. There were three cameras. That meant that at least one of them had to have caught Officer Perkins giving her the knife! If she was going down, then he would be going right down with her.

But until then . . . well, there was no one she could contact about this who would be awake at the moment. So perhaps she should just try and wait out her shift, then contact one of her superiors in the morning and explain the situation.

Sunny nodded to herself. A plan. She had a plan.

All she had to do was wait it out until her shift ended at five.

So that was what she did.

She woke up to Mark shaking her shoulder. “Hmm?”

“Wake up. Shift’s over, you gotta go home.” Mark poked her some more, then walked off. He wasn’t really that dedicated to her experience as an employee for the New York Police Department.

“Mmhm.” Sunny pressed her forehead into her desk and groaned. Her mouth tasted chalky. “Oh!” She sat upright with a gasp, the events of only a few hours previous coming back to her. She got up and grabbed her purse and the keys to the lab. Her mind whirled with anxiety.

Who could she contact about what happened who wouldn’t fire her on the spot?

She began compiling a list while locking up. Mark had already pulled out of the parking lot, leaving her old car the only one there. Sunny put the lab keys in her purse and pulled out her car keys. Above her, the sky was filled with dark clouds, the remnants of that night’s rainstorm. It was still lightly sprinkling.

Upon opening up the door and trying to start the engine, she was presented with a problem. The problem was that the engine wouldn’t start.

One problem after another, it seemed. “For the love of God,” she muttered. She got out of her car and slammed the door. Sunny had no idea how cars worked, and she definitely didn’t know how to fix it. With the rain coming down and the sun still hiding, an Uber would have to do.

Sunny locked her car doors again while digging through her bag for her phone. She started heading inside to wait while calling one.

Except.

After she had unlocked the doors and stepped in, there was problem number three: A stranger in her lab. Someone had managed to get in through one of the back doors, which were always locked.

They made eye contact. He stood up. She stepped back. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

The man was wearing some sort of military uniform, and didn’t look particularly dangerous, but that didn’t change the fact that he was in the lab.

“Ma’am,” he greeted.

She nodded back. “Howdy. How’s it going?”

“Just fine, thanks. You’re Sunny Simmons, correct?”

Pressing herself against the doors, she nodded slowly. “Yeah. Who’re you?” Her heart went thump thump thump in her chest  

“I’m Colonel Rhodes. I need to talk to you about some things that happened with the SAFE a few hours previous. Why don’t you have a seat?”

Chapter Text

Peter gingerly lifted up the edge of his sweater. He winced at the gnarly half-scab-half-scar on his left side. It had stopped bleeding some time during the night, thank god, but it was still badly bruised and red.

He poked it with one curious finger, then immediately regretted it at the bullet of pain that shot through him. Peter had tried to put a bandage on it during the night, but it kept on falling off. Probably because he wasn’t a doctor and had never tried to bandage anything larger than a scraped knee.

He stared at the wound for a moment longer. His enhanced healing would probably wrap things up sometime during school, but he knew the scar would take longer to go away.

No more beach days for me, he thought.

May pounded on the bathroom door, making him jump and drop his sweater back into place. “Hurry up, Pete! You’re gonna be late again!”

Putting a hand over his racing heart, Peter took some deep breaths and grabbed his backpack. He swung open the bathroom door and stepped out. Ready to start the day as Peter Parker, straight-A student and Definitely Not Spider-Man.

“We have to see him.” Pepper strode from one end of the lab to the other, her hands knotted in front of her. “We have to contact him.”

Tony rubbed his temples, the lack of sleep getting to him. He didn’t want to get up to make coffee, though. It was all the way across the room. “I think we should take it slow. The SAFE might have malfunctioned, it—it might not be right.”

His wife shook her head, lips pressed together in a thin line. “Nope. Nuh-uh. You created it yourself, you really think it could malfunction?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time one of my projects went wrong.”

“Tony, you know as well as I do that it didn’t ‘go wrong’. It went perfectly right, and it found Peter, and now you’re too scared to do something about it!” Pepper halted in front of him and put her hands on her hips. When he had first called her down to the lab, she was tired, then confused, then wrecked. The two had cried on the couch together for a couple of hours before she stood up and, in classic Pepper Potts fashion, started thinking of solutions.

He put his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands together. “I don’t think we should rush into anything.”

“If it were up to you, we’d just ignore this and pretend it never happened!”

“That’s not true. I—I think we should just hold out for a bit. I can run some background checks, find out who his family is. We could be wrong.”

“Bullshit we’ll hold back! And don’t like you haven’t already run a background check on him, Tony, because I can tell when you’re lying to me.”

He stared at her fuming figure for a few seconds before closing his eyes and dragging his fingers over his face. Tony groaned before clapping his hands together and standing up. He held his hands up as if surrendering and said, “Alright, you caught me. I ran a background check.”

Pepper paused, her arms crossed. After waiting for him to go on, she asked, “And?”

Tony opened and closed his mouth a few times like a fish out of water. Finally he closed it and made a frustrated noise. The words were there, they just all wanted to come out at the same time, so they piled up behind his teeth and choked him of his syllables. “I—it—“ He gripped the back of his neck, breathing hard. He hadn’t stuttered like this since before his parents died, save the night he proposed to Pepper. It felt like his own voice was linking hands and slowly choking him—it felt like he couldn’t breathe, much less speak.

Suddenly, there were hands on his shoulders, pushing him down until he was sat on the couch again. Pepper wrapped her hands around his shoulders and pulled his closer so he could bury his face in her belly; his own arms came up around her waist.

Five minutes passed like that. Pepper ran a hand through his hair, speaking to him under her breath. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry. I—“

Before she could finish, Tony was standing up, still holding her close, still keeping his arms around her. “Shut up. You didn’t do anything, I’m being cowardly, you were right.”

“They kept his first name,” Tony told her. He felt her stiffen, her hands digging into his shoulders.

Gently pushing her away, he avoided her eyes and walked over to one of his desks. He had the file printed out already. It was printed out basically as soon FRIDAY told him of the SAFE alert. Granted, he was planning to wait until they had both caught up on sleep and food before forking it over, but when did anything ever go according to plan?

The folder was shoved into the bottommost drawer. He pulled it out and nervously tapped it on his other palm. “He’s still . . . he’s still Peter.” Tony sat on the couch again and gave the file to Pepper.

She took it with shaking hands. After clutching the edges for a moment, she abruptly joined Tony on the couch, pressing her knee into his as if he could transfer courage through touch.

Even after sitting, she didn’t open it right away. Tony wasn’t in any rush, he had memorized the contents as soon as it was all available—however dubious the means he had used to get it was.

Pepper traced her finger in an invisible pattern on the beige cover. Her swallow was audible. “He’s still Peter?”

“Yup.”

Nodding, Pepper opened it all at once, shoulders tense like she was defusing a bomb. Once her eyes focused on the words, she slumped against Tony’s side, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

He automatically put an arm around her, worry brewing in his stomach. “You okay?”

“Yes.” Her voice was tight. She took a shuddering breath and placed a finger on the small picture of Peter that Tony had gotten off his school records.

(Straight A student, atta boy.)

“Peter Parker. . . .” She murmured. “Peter Benjamin Parker. Who’s Benjamin?”

“His uncle. Dead. He lives his aunt, May Parker.”

“But she really isn’t his aunt, though, is she? She’s just a random lady. Same with Benjamin. He’s just some random guy.” Pepper looked up from the file to stare at Tony, eyes blazing. She looked livid in a way he hadn’t seen in a very long time; a way that sent chills down his spine.

His arm tightened around her shoulder, turning from a comfort to a vise. “Pepper, don’t let—“ he began, only to be cut off by his wife throwing herself off the couch to pace the floor again.

“He’s living with—with a stranger! He—our son is living with a random lady! Who is she? How did he even come into her custody?” Pepper ran her hands through her hair, eyes bouncing off the walls. Her voice rose with every word.

Tony stood, hands held out in a placating gesture. “I have another file on her, and another on his uncle. I couldn’t find much about his parents—“

“That’s because we’re his parents, Tony! We are!”

“I know, I know. But whatever you’re thinking right now, we can’t just go busting in there to get him!”

“Why not?” Pepper waved the file in the air. “He’s our son! We need to go get him, Tony, we can’t just leave him in the care of this stranger—“ she stopped talking to fan herself.

Tony wanted to get up, but he knew she wouldn’t want his comfort. When she got worked up like this, it was best to allow her to let it all out until the rage cleared.

“He’s been living with her for eleven years, he isn’t dead yet.” Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. A sleep-deprivation headache was forming. “We aren’t exactly supposed to have access to all that information anyways. We weren’t even supposed to get the alert, the FBI doesn’t know I had the PERPS program installed. What’s gonna happen if we go get him, right now?”

Pepper dropped the file on a chair and picked up a wrench from a desk, hitting the palm of her hand with it viciously. Not in a threatening way, but like she was on the verge of going berserk and needed the weight to keep her focused. “We get our son back, is what happens.”

“Yeah, and everyone from here to Japan finds out that Peter’s alive. That includes HYDRA, SHIELD, newspapers, paparazzi, the entire team, and did I mention HYDRA?”

“So we’ll keep it on the down low.”

“There are eyes and ears everywhere. What will May Parker do if we take him? Chances are she’s affiliated with whoever took him, if she herself didn’t do it. Either way, it’s too risky.”

“Okay,” she said, dropping the wrench noisily onto the floor. “So what do you suggest we do? Write her a goddamn letter?”

Tony shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know! The only plan I’ve got is to go in slow and not startle her. Think about Peter—“

“I am thinking of Peter!”

“—What’s it gonna be like for him, realizing his entire life was a lie?”

“He can adjust—“

Tony leapt to his feet. “He was kidnapped when he was four, for God’s sake! Honey, I’m sorry, but chances are he isn’t going to remember us.”

They both froze, staring at each other, breathing hard. Pepper licked her lips, then pressed them together very tightly.

It looked like she was about to start crying, but that wasn’t the Pepper Potts way. Instead, she just drew herself up nice and tall and squared her shoulders and said, “It’s Peter, Tony. It’s Peter.”

Then she turned around and walked out of the lab; paused only to pick the file up again to clutch it to her chest.

Tony dragged his hands through his hair. Staring at the ceiling, he gripped the back of his neck and let out a slow, deep breath. Trying to calm himself. “Shit,” he muttered.

He had barely sat down again before Rhodey was striding in, waving his own folder in the air, and saying, “It’s all done. She signed the NDA well enough, and I didn’t have to bribe her much. Weirdest thing—all she wanted was a good recommendation letter and a move to the day shift. Think I let her off too easy? Maybe I should’ve pressed a bit harder, but she was pretty agreeable. I don’t even think she saw anything important.”

It wasn’t until he had stopped speaking that he noticed Tony’s ruffled state of being. “Hey, you alright, man?”

“I told Pepper,” he answered fully. “It . . . did not go over well.”

“Oh, Tones,” Rhodey sighed. He plopped down on the couch next to Tony. “Where is she?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. She left, took the file.”

“The file?”

“I ran a background check on him and his family. Gathered everything I could to print it out. He’s a straight A student, did you know that? Goes to a real nice school. Midtown. A school of ‘science and technology’. All his teachers love him, according to his last report card.”

“Tony, that’s . . . beyond illegal. How did you even get that information, did you hack into the school’s database?” He held up a hand before Tony could answer and said, “Don’t bother. The less I know, the better.”

They lapsed into silence. It was only broken when Tony asked, “So, the forensic scientist, what was her name?”

“Sunny Simmons?”

“Yeah. How’d she take it, how’d it, uh, how did it go?”

Rhodey rubbed his hands together, smiling. “I think it went well. She didn’t seem to care that much whether or not anyone knew—actually, she was pretty relieved when I told her she couldn’t tell anyone. I think she was worried she would get in trouble; she thought she had broken it.”

Tony snorted at that. “Where did she, uh. . . ?” Even though he didn’t finish the sentence, Rhodey knew what he meant in the way that only a friend who had spent a great deal of time and a great deal of stress in the presence of the other could understand the non-verbal and unfinished cues they gave.

“That’s where this gets weird.”

His stomach leaped. “How so?”

“Well, the person who brought in the stuff to be tested—right off the bat, it was blood. On a knife, she said.”

His hand shot out, gripping Rhodey’s wrist. “It was blood?”

“Not a lot! Just—would you shut up and let me speak?” Rhodey brushed him off and continued. “Sunny told me that an officer—Officer Jake Perkins—came in during her shift and told her he needed her to check the DNA and run it through the system to see if anyone came up. He asked her to keep it on the down-low. When Perkins heard that it would take a while to get the results, he ordered her to use the SAFE, despite knowing she didn’t have the authority to do so. He also asked that she print out and hand him the results in person, not to email them.”

“But how did the blood of a high school sophomore wind up on a knife in the custody of a police officer? And why did he want to keep it hidden?”

“Think he’s up to something?”

Tony shrugged, scratching his beard. “I dunno. Peter isn’t in custody. And he went to school like normal this morning.”

“How do you know that?” Rhodey’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

Without answering him directly, Tony said, “FRIDAY, pull up the PERPS screen.”

Nearby the couch, on a random desk, a holographic screen came to life, showing a plain view of a seemingly random apartment building. The angle was slanted, like it was being taken from above. The view focused mainly on the front doors, though it did show a good amount of the street on either side.

“Tony . . . is that . . . ?”

“Live footage from a surveillance camera across the street from where Peter’s living? Yeah.”

“Oh. That’s really illegal, you know.”

“I know.”

They went silent again. On the screen, an old woman leading a cat on a leash walked past the building and out of frame.

“Hey, what did Pepper say about everything?”

Tony sighed heavily. He slouched on the couch, spreading his legs out wide like a teenage boy. “She thinks we should go get him.”

“What—you aren’t getting him?” Rhodes stiffened, planting his feet on the floor.

“Jesus Christ, what is this, crap-on-Tony’s-idea day?” He threw his hands in the air.

Rhodey punched his arm. “Are you or are you not getting my godchild?”

“No! Yes? Eventually. I just—I don’t think we should rush in right away. I wanted to do surveillance for a while, find out as much I can about May Parker. I dunno. I don’t want to draw too much attention to the whole situation, since . . . well, you know.”

“Yup.”

Rhodey paused for a moment before asking, “Can I tell you something?”

“Can I stop you?” Tony replied.

“No,” he answered. “Okay, here goes: I think you aren’t registering the fact that you found Peter.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?” His voice had an edge of warning in it.

“I think you’re aware that you found him, but you haven’t registered it. You—you’re focusing on all the minor details instead of the big ones; where he lives, what his grades are, what school he goes to. You’re focusing on those easy details instead of the hard ones. Like who took him, when you can get him back, how he came to be in custody of this May Parker lady . . . Tony, you’re micromanaging because you’re scared.”

He rolled his eyes and began to protest, but was cut off by Rhodey shaking his shoulder.

“You’re scared that if you focus on the big things—like the fact that you found your son—it’ll all go away. Which is why you wanna take things slow. You’re scared he isn’t your son anymore.”

Tony nonchalantly shrugged off his friend’s hand and stood, pacing the same path Pepper had done only a couple of minutes earlier. “Did Pepper put you up to this?”

“What? No.” Rhodes tracked him with his eyes, staying as still as granite on the couch. “Why do you ask that?”

“Because you sound exactly like her. What, are you wearing an earpiece?” He spun on a heel and suddenly yelled, “You can’t trick me, honey!”

Standing, Rhodey slapped his friend upside the head. “I haven’t spoken to Pepper all day! Stop making yourself look like an idiot again.”

“Bah,” he spat, pacing again. “You and Pepper—two peas in a pod. I’m not scared! He—I just don’t want to rush anything. I don’t want to fuck anything up even more than it already is.”

“Stop lying to yourself, Tony! Pepper is right, and if he was my kid, I’d be kicking down his door and getting him right now!”

“But he isn’t your kid!” Tony snapped. “He’s mine! My kid! My—my kid is . . . he’s my kid, Rhodey. He doesn’t even know it.”

The father’s voice got quieter near the end, as if he was talking to himself. He stared at the floor for a few seconds, barely moving. Suddenly, he shook himself and looked back up, face unreadable. “Please leave. Please—I just need some time. Pepper and I both do. We. . . . Please, just leave.”

Rhodey’s eyes were sorrowful. He nodded and clapped Tony on the shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’ll be back later. Remember to eat something, alright?” Once Tony nodded, Rhodey squeezed his arm and left.

Chapter Text

Contrary to popular belief, Natasha Romanoff trusted people easily. It was part of her training. If you had no team, no backup,then you had next to nothing. Go with the flow. Trust until you were in the clear, then go back and fix the mistakes.

She trusted easily, all right. It was just very easy to lose that trust.

Some called it paranoia—she called it being smart. Being selective. Being a spy.

She was trained to be curious, to question everything, to keep one eye open no matter who she was with. It was strategy. Natasha knew what to do with who. She wasn’t a good people person, but she was a damn good spy, and sometimes those were the same thing.

She trusted her team. The Avengers. They had saved her ass—and vice versa—a thousand times over. Clint was the easiest to trust, because he was the easiest to read. Mainly because he didn’t even try to hide anything. Clint was an open book, and she took comfort in the fact that she was allowed to look through it. Natasha could walk up to him at any given moment and ask him anything, and nine times out of ten he would answer honestly and quickly. It was why they were such good friends.

The hardest person to trust was a shifting thing. Sometimes it was Steve—he was a Good Person, and therefore did the Good Thing, but it wasn’t always clear how he was going to do it. If he felt that one of his teammates wasn’t on one hundred percent on par with his plans, he would drop them. That made him risky.

Other times it was Tony. He was the one she was most hesitant about, at first. Tony was flighty, unpredictable, and utterly too easy to control. It was a pity. Everyone knew his weakness. One word about Peter and he was out the door, tracking down another false lead. Besides his Achilles heel, he was loyal, and steady as a rock in times of crisis. Nevertheless, he was too susceptible to false hope, and hope was a dangerous thing by itself, which placed him low on her list of safeguards.

Tony Stark was full of surprises, and that wasn’t good for a spy.

When she walked into his lab, there were five holographic screens floating around the room, each showing a different, seemingly random place. An apartment building, a school, and a house were the only ones she could clearly see before Tony was shutting them off, asking her why she didn’t bother to knock before walking in.

She blinked at him. “You told me to come down today. The Widow Bites, remember?”

“I did? I did. Yeah, sorry, I’ve got stuff on the brain.” Tony looked around for a few moments like a lost child before walking to a cabinet and rustling around in it.

“New project?” She asked casually, walking further in.

“Something like that.”

He grabbed a small metal box and tossed it to her. “New and improved, Romanoff. They should charge faster, blast harder, and look cooler.”

She caught it and absentmindedly turned it around in her hands. “I’ll hold you to it.” Natasha abruptly turned and began to walk out.

“What, no thank you?” Tony yelled after her, though it didn’t sound like his heart was in it.

“I’ll thank you when they work!” She yelled back.

And after I find out what those screens are for, she added silently.

Tracking down Sam Wilson was easy. He was lower on the trust scale than Clint, but higher than Steve, which made him her second choice since Clint was gone.

Bruce would normally be second on the scale—not because they were particularly close, but because he was just a shitty liar. But that meant he wouldn’t be able to keep a secret, which eliminated him. Steve wouldn’t approve, so he was out. Bucky just wanted to keep his head down, so he was also out. Thor was too busy running between Earth and Asgard to be her partner-in-crime, and everyone else was on a mission, and this was urgent.

Sam was in the common room, solving a puzzle on the ground.

“Are you twelve, Wilson?” She asked as a greeting, sitting on the floor across from him.

He barely looked up. The whole team knew she didn’t do hellos—no goodbyes either, for that matter. “Keeps my mind sharp. I’m training.”

“You could just read a book.”

“Takes too long.”

“How long have you been working on this puzzle?”

“About three hours, why?”

She shook her head, dismissing the topic. “Tony’s up to something.”

That got his attention. Sam looked up, letting a corner piece fall from his fingertips. “What d’you mean?”

“I was just in his lab. He had five screens showing five different places up, like he was watching them, and as soon as I walked in he shut them down and didn’t answer my questions.”

“Did you consider just flat-out asking him what he’s doing?” Sam lowered his voice like Tony would be able to hear them.

Natasha shrugged. She had this in the bag already. “No. Wanna find out with me?”

Like the smart boy he was, Sam seemed cautious. “Why me?”

“Clint’s out, so you’re door number two.”

“Second choice, nice!” He held up a hand for a high-five. “Let’s go find out what Tony’s hiding!”

She smacked her palm against his. “And Sam? We’re gonna keep this between us, for now.”

line break line break

Pepper knew what she was doing was dumb. It could easily blow up in her face. It could blow up in everyone’s face.

But. She. Was. Still. Here.

She peered over the top of the newspaper at the apartment building in front of her. Waiting. Waiting for either Peter or May Parker, she didn’t know, one or the other.

It was weird to be doing things without a plan. Usually, she was so meticulous, so controlled. Now though . . . she was rogue.

It felt good. Kind of fun, actually. Like she was a hardened spy who killed a president or something and was now on the run from the FBI, but she had to return home one last time to say goodbye to her family.

Funnily enough, it was easier to pretend that that was the situation than it was to deal with the current one. Which was her, sitting on a bench in front of her lost son’s apartment building, unsure of what she was doing there, with the light rain falling on her hood and messing up the ink on her newspaper.

Tony didn’t know she was there. They weren’t the type of couple to tell each other where they were every minute of every single day—it was more like “You’re either in Africa or Greenland right now, I can’t tell because your last voicemail was kind of spotty, but either way I’m on my way to Italy. Call you later!”—but he wouldn’t be pleased that she was here. Especially after he wanted to take things slow.

Think of the devil, her phone started ringing. Pepper wasn’t good at lying to Tony. She didn’t want to be good at lying to him. She answered with her heart in her throat.

“Hey, Peps, where you at?”

She cleared her throat and said, “I’m in the car.” Thank god most of her tells were physical; she could tug on her hair as much as she wanted and her husband wouldn’t be able to tell over the phone.

“Where to? I was thinking of making some Mexican for dinner, how do you feel about tacos?”

“Tacos sound good. I’m, uh, on my way to the . . . compound.” Pepper drew the last word out, wincing at her flimsy excuse.

“The compound? Why?” Tony sounded rightfully confused. But was that a hint of suspicion in his voice, or was she just being paranoid?

Pepper tugged on a lock of hair so tightly that tears came to her eyes. “I heard there was a problem between the IT team and and the PR department, so I was just going to head down there and see what I could do to help. Be a good CEO, you know.”

Thank god, he chuckled on the other end. “Pepper Potts, CEO, billionaire, HR stand-in.”

“Someone has to do it.” She laughed—a mix of nerves and relief made her giddy. “Most of our HR is working on the Nat situation.”

The ‘Nat Situation’, as it was dubbed, was that Natasha Romanoff had made almost twenty agents quit and try to file complaints against the company for ‘psychological damages’ after she gave them one training session. One. Singular. One training session that lasted half an hour before they bolted.

They still weren’t completely sure what had happened in the gym. The agents didn’t want to talk about it; and every time it came up, Nat smiled and said, “I’m just weeding out the weak.”

“Ah, it’ll be fine. Know when you’ll be home?”

Pepper stared at her wedding ring. A fat drop of rain landed on the diamond and turned it into a prism of light. “Late,” she said. “Leave some tacos for me, please.”

“Of course.”

“I gotta go now.” The lump in her throat was inflating like a balloon, choking her more and more. “Loveyoubye.”

She hung up before he could reply.

The rain continued falling. It tap, tap, tapped on her hood, whispering Mother Nature’s melody. Cars drove past, little waves jumping away from the tires. It was quiet and loud at the same time.

Peter walked out of the building.

She sucked in a breath on instinct and held the newspaper up to her face, leaving just her eyes visible. He was right there. Putting in earbuds. Eyes aimlessly scanning the street.

Peter. Her Peter. Her baby.

He pressed something on his phone and then put his hands in his pockets, starting down the street.

Almost unconsciously, she stood and followed at a distance, leaving the newspaper on the bench. She was dressed inconspicuously in a raincoat and jeans. Her hood and hair hid most of her face to prevent anyone recognizing her, but she couldn’t resist adding a pair of oversized sunglasses to complete the ensemble. Now, though, she took them off and shoved them in a pocket, wanting to see him in full, shining color.

What’s he listening to? Pepper thought. Her chest ached.

When Peter was still with them, she used to sing to him. An Italian lullaby that Tony told her his own mother sang to him. She didn’t know Italian—not at the time—but she took the time to learn the lullaby so that she could pass it on.

Tony always teased her about being cheesy. She still walked in on him singing to Peter a couple of times. Sometimes they would switch off halfway through singing, so the other could get some rest.

She wondered if he remembered the song.

Peter Benjamin Parker, she thought. Pepper had the file on him that Tony printed out tucked into her bag. All the information was already memorized, but it made her feel safer to have it on her person. Age 15. Son of Mary and Richard Parker. Who the hell are Mary and Richard?

Speeding up, Pepper knocked past several strangers to keep Peter in her sights. He was so close. She was so close.

Eleven years. She hadn’t seen him in eleven years. And now he was there. Right in front of her. On the same street.

A sob hit the back of her gritted teeth. Pepper held a hand over her mouth and breathed through her nose. Tears clouded her vision. But this was New York, so besides a few lingering glances, nobody stopped.

Pepper walked faster and faster. She bounced off the shoulders of passerby like they weren’t there. Completely disregarding her cover, she started ramming through the crowd, her eyes locked on Peter’s back.

Peter. Her Peter. Her son. Her broken heart.

And then. He stopped. And turned. Slowly. Painfully slowly. Peter turned and smiled at a vendor selling soda. She could see his face—his full, unobstructed face. He looked, somehow, exactly and nothing like what she expected. A small part of her maybe still hoped that he was the chubby cheeked, gap toothed four year old she remembered, but that was silly. He was thinner now, with perfect teeth, and bright eyes. Dark circles stained the spaces under. He stays up late, she thought, just like his parents.

She couldn’t do this. Pepper looked around wildly, then ran into an alley where she could cry in peace. Her heart was threatening to beat itself out of her chest, while her mind was berating her. What were you thinking? That he would see you and eleven years of memories would all mean nothing?That everything would be fine and dandy again? He doesn’t even know you exist!

High whimpering noises clawed at the edges of her throat. She was trying to hold it in, but that only made it worse. Tears dripped off her chin like a leaky faucet.

Peter doesn’t know you exist. The thought made her cry louder and bury her face in her hands. She pushed her hood off and relished the cool rain going down the back of her shirt.

It was a bad idea to come here, but Pepper was desperate. She just wanted to see her son.

Hours later, when she returned to the tower, Tony was waiting for her. Despite being free to come back at any moment, Pepper had wandered through her old haunts, trying to calm down. She cried twice more that night—once in a public bathroom, another in the abandoned Biography section of a public library. Her eyes were red and raw, her nails chewed to the quick, her hair soaked.

His back was to her when she walked in. He was in the kitchen, packing up leftovers. Tony heard her footsteps and laughed. “You barely missed it, Peps.”

She sniffed. By that sound alone, her husband seemed to know something was up. He turned around and scanned her from head to toe. Taking in her rumpled coat, limp hair, and drawn face. Tony dropped the Tupperware he was holding and hurried over. “What happened? You didn’t get kicked out of your mistresses house, did you?”

Chuckling wetly, Pepper used her wrist to wipe her face. “Not yet. Um . . . I went to the apartment. Peter’s. To see him.”

He stilled. Barely for a moment, but it was noticeable enough. Tony pulled her close, rubbing his hands down her arms to warm her up. “And?”

“And I saw him.”

“And?”

“And he didn’t see me.”

A breath of relief loosened his shoulders. Tony wrapped his arms around her waist, squeezing her reassuringly. “Are you okay?”

Like his words were a battering ram busting down the door of her emotions, Pepper choked on a sob. She clutched his shirt and buried her face in his shoulder. “No . . . no, I’m not. He doesn’t even know me, Tony. If he had seen me, he wouldn’t have recognized me.”

He rubbed circles onto her back. Tony held onto her so tightly she thought she might fall apart if he let go.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, “we’re going to get him back. It’s just going to take a while.”

“He’s gone,” she cried, “even if he get him back , . . it won’t be him. He won’t—he won’t be our son!”

Tony shushed her. “It’ll be fine, Pepper. Don’t worry about it. I’m going to make it alright.” He repeated the last words like a prayer.

I’m going to make it alright.

It was business as usual on Friday. His wound finished healing during school, and since he had cut off his night early on Thursday, he chose to stay out extra late to make up for it.

Aunt May thought he was spending the night at Ned’s house. Ned said he would leave a window open for Peter to crawl into. Having him know about his secret identity was nerve racking, but it came in handy from time to time.

Peter crouched on the ledge of his apartment building, watching the cars go past. It had been drizzling on and off all week, but for the moment it had stopped. The smell of petrichor and gas saturated the air.

It was calm. It was safe. It was familiar.

It was home.

A long wail cut through the air, startling him. The source, he saw, was from a little girl sitting on a bench next to what must be her big sister. The little girl had dropped her sandwich and decided to cry about it.

Mood.

It reminded him a little of the woman he heard earlier that day. For a while he thought she was following him, which would have been ridiculous. He relaxed after she ducked into an alley, but his enhanced hearing picked up on the sound of sobbing barely seconds later.

Peter had been concerned, at first. Then he realized it was probably just another New York crazy and continued walking. There were lots of sobbing people in New York. It was just one of those things.

Chapter Text

Ow . . . Ow . . . Ow . . .

Sam Wilson limped his way into his room, back aching. He had been training new agents all week, and it was taking a toll on his body.

Sure, he was one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes; and yeah, he’d saved the planet a good handful of times; but Agent 23 kept on doing this weird Karate punch that made him go temporarily blind in one eye, so maybe it was time for him to retire.

He opened his door with a groan. All he wanted was a nice, hot bath with some scented oils, maybe a few candles, a cup of tea—

“Sam.”

Screaming—in a very manly way—Sam whirled around, fists out. Natasha fucking Romanoff was standing in front of his doorway, her arms crossed.

“When did you get in here?” He wheezed. Sam placed a hand over his heart.

She shrugged. “Ten minutes ago. I’ve been waiting for you to get back.” She paused and looked him over. “You look like shit.”

He scowled and stumbled over to his enormous bed, falling into the heavenly blanket and pillows. “Well, I’ve been training all day. You know—doing my job? What have you been doing?”

She sat carefully on the edge of his bed. Her spine was tense. Did she ever relax? “Not that. Come on, Tony and Pepper left for the day for ‘personal reasons’. You know what that means.”

“They’re gonna go bang, probably.” Sam raised an eyebrow at her. “Why should I care?”

Nat stared at him silently for a couple of seconds before sighing heavily and pinching her nose bridge. “No, you dumbass, it means we get to go snoop and find out what Tony was up to the other day in his lab.”

“Ooooooh!” Sam sat up straight, his spine wailing, and grinned. “What are we waiting for, then?”

“I was waiting for you. If you aren’t too injured to do it.” There was a small amount of teasing in her voice, but Sam still puffed out his chest and got out of bed.

“You kiddin’ me? I’m in peak condition. Couldn’t stop me if you tried. On top of the world, this guy.”

Nat stood up. “Are you done?”

“Yup.” He followed her out the door.

Tony’s lab was really only locked when he was in there and didn’t want to be disturbed. Too many of the team’s weapons and essential gear were in there for it to be off-limits at all times. However, to keep citizens and unwanted guests from coming in, you had to provide a handprint and voice recognition whilst in the elevator before it would ever take you down there. Of course, your voice recognition phrase was susceptible to change at any moment, which left many employees standing in the elevator saying random things until either it worked or security was notified.

His personal workshop took up the entire 79th floor, right underneath his and Pepper’s apartment. Above that was the so-called ‘party deck’, which had the common rooms plus landing pads jutting out from the side for quinjets and helicopters.

Nat pressed her hand to a small screen built into the elevator and said, “Natasha Romanoff.”

FRIDAY said, “Voice recognition denied.”

Sam furrowed his eyebrows while Natasha cursed. “Natalie Rushman.”

“Voice recognition denied.”

What the hell?

“Black Widow?” Now her voice sounded confused. Confused and pissed. Had Tony removed her all-access from the system? He usually warned them before he changed their passes.

“Voice recognition denied.”

“Maybe you should just let me do it,” Sam suggested, moving to put his hand on the scanner. Nat grabbed his wrist so quickly it was like a snake bite.

“No,” she told him. “I think I got it. FRIDAY, is it . . . Spider Bitch?”

“Welcome, Natasha, I’m taking you to Tony’s lab now.”

Natasha gritted her teeth and mumbled obscenities under her breath while Sam tried not to laugh. It sounded suspiciously like, “I’m going to rip his tongue out, don’t care how much he uses it, someone needs to teach him to keep his mouth shut.”

On the bright side, now she was only more motivated to screw with Tony. When he pointed this out, though, she tried to dick punch him, so maybe he shouldn’t have said anything at all.

The workshop had a permanent smell of oil, smoke, and one of Steve’s cologne bottles that Clint smashed on the ground after he ate the last slice of pizza. Since it spanned the entire floor, it had several rooms dedicated to different projects and machines. Nat gestured for them to split up.

The room Sam wandered into seemed to be an abandoned testing lab. Half finished Iron Man suits littered the ground and were hung from the ceiling. A suspicious glowing thing that sorta looked like a helmet was encased in thick glass with a sticky note on it that read DO NOT OPEN!!! Ripped and stained papers littered the ground. Sam wondered what had happened in here to make Tony stop working in it.

He left that room—the glowing helmet was giving him a headache—and went into the next, which was filled with strange tools that were either finished and really ugly or were still being developed. Squinting and looking to the side made one of them look like an enormous coat hanger, kind of. Nevertheless, there didn’t seem to be any damming secrets lying about. He moved on.

By the time he tracked down Nat again, she was only on her second room. Sam had gone through four. “In case you didn’t notice, we’re kind of on a time crunch. Pepper and Tony could be back any second.”

She scowled at him. “I’m taking my time. A fast spy is a bad spy.”

“I’m not a bad spy!”

“Wilson, you wouldn’t know espionage if it kicked you in the face.”

“A spy who kicks their targets in the face is a bad spy.”

She ignored him in favor of pushing some holographic buttons on Tony’s desk. Evidentially, she must have pressed the right things, because five cameras popped right up. He recognized the apartment building, house, and school that she told him about, but the last two were mysteries. “A bodega and a police station. Are we sure he isn’t stalking anyone?”

When no response from his counterpart came, he saw that she was frowning into a Manila file. There was a little crease in between her eyebrows that meant she was confused. Another folder lay open on the table beside her.

“Nat?” He walked closer.

As if his footsteps were an alarm, she snapped the folder shut and put both of them on the desk where she found them. “We have to go,” she told him, grabbing his arm and hauling him out after shutting the cameras off.

He stumbled alongside her, trying not to trip. “Natasha, what was in those files?”

“Not here,” hissed the spy. She raised her voice and said, “FRIDAY, don’t tell anyone we were here.”

There was a short pause, then the AI said, “I won’t tell them if they do not ask me, Miss.”

She muttered, “That’s the best we can hope for, isn’t it?”

Sam’s protests and questions were completely ignored all the way up in the elevator. It wasn’t until they were back on Sam’s room that Nat let go of him and began pacing. “This isn’t good. . . . This is very bad.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She whirled around, eyes blazing, and blurted out, “They found Peter.”

Silence threw a pall over the room.

“Peter, as in . . . Peter, Peter?”

“No, they found a random teenage boy named Peter and decided to stalk him. Yes, as in Peter, Peter!”

Resisting the urge to snap at her for being sarcastic, Sam sucked in a breath and grabbed the back of his neck. “Oh, damn.”

“I know.”

“But . . . how?”

“I don’t know.” The redhead went from one wall to the other, back and forth, nervous energy in human form. “Those files were for him and his ‘Aunt May’.” Finger quotes went around the words Aunt May.

Sam’s blood drained out of his face. He stumbled over to an armchair and collapsed into it. “How?”

“His legal name is Peter Parker, but his age and features match our Peter.”

Our Peter. Not their Peter. Not Tony and Pepper’s Peter. Because Peter was, in a way, all of theirs. The team had never met the boy, as he was kidnapped before Tony was Iron Man, but he felt like theirs. They had watched Tony and Pepper grieve the loss of their son over and over again like clockwork, every year. Our Peter, because if it came down to it, the whole team would be busting down the door of whoever had taken him, guns blazing.

“How?”

“I suppose they must have just found out recently, considering we haven’t heard anything.”

They were have two different conversations. Natasha, ever the spy, was trying to reason it out and connect the dots. Sam was still trying to figure out how they found him.

“Those cameras must be places he frequents. They could be there right now!” Nat stopped in her tracks and bit down on a knuckle. “We can’t let them know we know,” she said.

He finally looked up from the ground. “What?”

The sunlight glinted off her perfect red hair when she turned to face him. “They can’t find out we know. Tony would kill us. It’s best if we just let them get him back on their own terms. If we interfere with their plans, they could freak out. Plus, if HYDRA’s watching us, they’ll notice something’s up. If they haven’t already. God.”

Dragging a hand over his face, Sam slowly nodded. He stood and held out a hand to his partner in crime. “No more spying,” he said firmly.

She grasped his hand and shook it. “No more spying,” she agreed.

And as quickly as it began, Sam and Nat’s partnership was over.

The only thing worse than not being able to work due to a broken ankle was not even being able to leave the house due to getting sick.

May grabbed a tissue from the coffee table and blew her nose. She sniffed and crumbled up the used paper, shoving it into the empty tissue box next to the full one. Grey’s Anatomy was playing on the TV, her go-to binge show. A cold cup of coffee was shoved between the two couch cushions next to her.

She felt like shit.

Pulling the enormous fluffy blanket she was under tighter around her shoulders, she pressed her temple against the armrest and winced. A headache was growing with every minute behind her eyes.

Sleep had eluded her all day. She woke up at four in the morning thinking she was going to throw up her empty stomach. Peter had wanted to stay home to take care of her, but she made him go. He didn’t need to miss any more school than he already did.

Someone knocked on the door.

It couldn’t be the delivery guy, because she had only just made the order so the food would arrive about when Peter got home.

May groaned into her arm and stood up. Maybe once they saw her pale face and thin hair, they would start running. Like she was the ghost haunting her apartment building and not the guy who had killed himself a decade earlier.

After undoing the locks on the door, her hand closed around the doorknob and pulled it. “Please, I really don’t—“ Her words died in her throat. She was going to say Please, I really don’t want to get anyone sick, but it seemed she didn’t have a choice. Fear clenched her heart with clammy fingers.

Standing in the doorway was Pepper Potts and Tony Stark.

Monday’s sucked. They sucked more when you had an Aunt stuck in the apartment, a fifty pound load of homework, and a healing stab wound that, while it wasn’t actively bleeding, still liked to randomly twinge with pain.

Peter hiked his backpack higher up on his shoulders and started planning his night. He would have to do double the chores because of May being sick—she would insist she could do them, but he wasn’t about to let his sick and injured Aunt get out of bed for even a second—and his History teacher wanted a minimum five thousand word essay on neglected activists in history by Wednesday.

For a moment, he considered skipping patrol that night. But he quickly dismissed he thought. He had already skipped Saturday for a sleepover at Ned’s, he didn’t want to make slacking a regular thing. Maybe he could buy some energy drinks from Delamar’s and pull an all-nighter.

While still considering the idea, he saw a familiar face walking up the steps in front of his building. Peter grinned. “Brandon!”

The delivery boy turned around at the call and waved. They ordered from his workplace so much that pretty much all the delivery people knew the Parker’s by sight. “What’s up, Peter? I was just about to go up.”

He was already waving him off, digging around in his backpack for his wallet. “Don’t bother. May’s kind of sick, so we probably shouldn’t expose you to her germs. I’ll take it up.”

While reaching for two tens—May insisted he always had at least ten dollars on his person at all times—his finger brushed the little triangle. When he pulled the drawing found in his drawer out of his shoe on Thursday morning, he had tucked it into his wallet so he wouldn’t lose it, then promptly forgot about it. He bypassed the drawing for the money, paid, thanked the man, and headed inside.

He knew May liked to binge watch Grey’s Anatomy whenever she was stuck inside, so he headed straight for the kitchen while shouting, “May, I got the goods! Two sandwiches, one with no mayo, both with no olives because olives are shit. Do we have any orange juice?”

After setting the bags on the counter and grabbing two paper plates, he loaded the food onto them and walked into the living room. He fully expected to see Aunt May bundled up with a red nose, which she kind of was, but the other two people were a surprise.

He stopped short. Usually, his Spidey senses would warn him of strangers unless he already knew them. But these two didn’t smell familiar—one had a delicate perfume on, and the other some spicy cologne, on top of the usual deodorant and body wash. It was a weird but pleasant combination. One of the weirder perks of having enhanced senses was that he had taken up the habit of identifying people by smell, rather than face.

The two strangers turned around. The man was standing beside the sole armchair Peter always roosted in, while the woman was sitting on the chair itself, her shiny nails digging into the armrests.

Had it not been for his sticky Spidey fingers, he would have dropped the plates.

“Peter!” May sounded surprised. She jumped to her feet, looking back and forth between her nephew and her guests.

“M—hi. Sorry, did I interrupt something . . . ?” His voice trailed off as he continued staring at the billionaires in his living room.

Neither Pepper Potts nor Tony Stark seemed like they were going to answer him. In fact, they both looked stunned. Shock was an actually pretty normal reaction when people first saw Peter—Aunt May did not look old enough to have a son. Once people found out he was actually her sister’s kid, they relaxed. But these two . . . they looked more than stunned. They looked dumbfounded. Astonished. Aghast. Maybe they had really, really not expected to be interrupted.

May hurried forward, sniffing heavily and not meeting his eyes. “I’m sorry, Pete, can you go to Ned’s for an hour or so while I wrap this up? I wanted to call you, but . . . I won’t be long, okay?”

Finally tearing his eyes away from the silent couple, Peter stuttered, “I don’t understand, what’s—what’s going on? You’re sick, and . . . and you should be resting.” A humiliated blush stained his cheeks. The only thing worse than stuttering was stuttering like an idiot in front of his idols.

She shook her head, lips pressed together so tightly they were almost white. “Peter, please.” Her voice was rough, almost silent. Was she scared or just sick?

Swallowing nervously, Peter lowered his own voice and asked, “Are they bothering you? Are you in trouble?”

Her hands were clutching his shoulders tightly, fingers locked in place. May shook her head, her breath brushing Peter’s face. “No. No, Pete, I’m fine. Just . . . please, go wait somewhere else. I’ll explain everything later.”

It was weird—something was obviously wrong. Yet his Spidey senses still weren’t going on. He stood on tiptoes while allowing himself to be pushed back so he could catch another glimpse of Pepper Potts and Tony Stark, if only to confirm to himself that they were actually there. His eyes slid over the stoic man to land on Pepper, who had a hand over her mouth with the other one clutching her husband’s wrist.

What the hell is going on?

“What abo—what about the food?” Peter held up the plates of takeout helplessly. He didn’t look away from Pepper.

May grabbed the plates and shoved them onto a random cabinet that they kept random stuff in. “I’ll call you when you can come back, okay?”

Peter placed his hands on his Aunt’s shoulders to steady himself before being shoved out the door. He dug in his heels and blurted out, “Have I seen you before?”

He heard Pepper’s small intake of air. She didn’t speak, but her eyes widened and Tony’s whole body tensed like a wire string.

“I—I recognize the . . . the raincoat.” His voice dropped to a sheepish mumble. Peter gestured towards the raincoat hanging from one of the hooks in the entryway—cold yellow with a big hood. “I—you were on the street. I think. I could be wrong, I’m sorry.”

It was a bit of a reach—why would Pepper Goddamn Potts be crying in an alleyway?—but he would bet money that it was the same coat.

May took advantage of him letting his guard down for a second to lightly push him out the door. She paused only long enough to say, “Love you, keep your phone on!” Before slamming the door on him.

Peter stated at the crooked number 4 on his apartment door. For a brief moment, he considered using his Spidey hearing to eavesdrop, but then dismissed the idea. When he first realized he had powers, he promised himself not to use them for matters of privacy—he trusted Aunt May. If she told him she was going to tell him, she would tell him.

In the meantime. . . .

He fumbled to unlock his phone while going down the stairs. “Hey, Ned?”

“Peter? What’s up? I thought you were going on patrol, did something happen?” Ned’s reliable voice came through.

“No. Well, I don’t think so.” Peter jumped the last five stairs and landed with a small grunt. He headed outside, realizing belatedly that he was still wearing his backpack. “Listen, you will not believe who’s in my living room right now.”

Officer Jake Perkins was not happy. He was the opposite of happy. He was enraged.

He paced from one end of the evidence locker to the other, hands gripping the leather of his belt so tightly his knuckles turned white under his calloused skin.

How do you lose a knife?

That was exactly what he asked the bumbling lab worker Simmons—right before she walked past him with her purse a shield held in front of her. She had just shrugged, refusing to meet his eyes, and said something about needing to get lunch.

He wasn’t stupid. The evasiveness, the sudden switch to the day shift, the twitchiness everytime he looked at her? Jake knew a buyout when he saw it.

The question was who had paid her? And why? Was it the Spider-Brat? Did his webs reach all the way into the system? Just how far did the masked vigilantes connections go? Who could he trust?

“Jake?”

He jumped and glared as Charlie squeezed his beer belly past a tower of dusty boxes.

“What do you want?”

His partner glared right back and crossed his arms. “To know why you’re hiding in the evidence locker, mainly.”

“I’m not hiding,” Jake said, resuming his pacing. “I’m pissed.”

“Yeah, you’re pissed, but you can’t hog the only decent anti-Captain zone in the whole building just because the temp got you the wrong coffee.”

Captain Dorian Beckett was notorious for his disdain of germs, and the evidence locker was the dirtiest room in the whole precinct, save the bathrooms. Every officer had fucked off in there at least one time to get a break from his strict hold on the team. “It’s not about the coffee.”

“Then what is it about?”

It’s about the fact that I’ve been trying to trap this fucking bug for the last six months and have jack shit to prove for it. It’s about the fact that the one solid piece of evidence I had that might help me identify him is now gone—not misplaced, not filed away, not in one of these goddamn boxes, gone. It’s about the fact that the forensics nerd I had working on the evidence is now mysteriously on the day shift and can’t even be in the same room as me. It’s about the fact that the Spider-Freak might have ties with the NYPD and could be controlling this whole operation. It’s about the fact that now everybody is a suspect, including you. It’s about the fact that now I have to figure out what happened in between me dropping off the knife and me coming to pick it that made it disappear.

“Nothing,” he said through gritted teeth.

Charlie sighed and scratched his neck. He shrugged and clapped Jake on the shoulder. “Look, I won’t pretend to know everything going on in that head of yours. But Vanessa just got dumped over text, Jerry’s wife packed an egg salad for lunch, and Juan wants to call his kids. Captain Beckett is getting suspicious. You can’t clog up the evidence locker for this long without causing chaos.”

Jake cracked his neck and kicked at the wall. “Fine. Whatever. Hey, tell me about that case you got going on.”

He followed his partner out of the room, nodding to the line of impatient, inconspicuous police officers waiting outside.

While listening to Charlie ramble on about his mysterious robber, Jake made a silent promise—a vow—to figure out who the Spider-Man was, and why the entire universe seemed to be on that guy’s side.

Chapter Text

“Are you May Parker?”

It was a stupid question. May doubted two of the world’s most accomplished business owners would show up on the doorstep of a commoner on a hunch. Nevertheless, she nodded.

Tony Stark grabbed his wife’s wrist and asked, “May we come in?”

She knew his asking was only a formality. If they wanted in, they would get in. Nevertheless, she nodded. May stepped aside, clutching the doorknob for support. Her knees had lost all feeling.

The two walked in. Pepper Potts paused a little ways in to shrug off her raincoat. Her husband took it from her and put it on one of the hooks in the entryway.

“Um . . . I’m kind of sick right now, so it’s messy.” She hurried past them to clean off the armchair where her and Peter’s coats were piled.

Pepper gracefully sat down and crossed her ankles. Tony leaned against the armrest, hands in pockets.

Swallowing through her dry throat, she asked, “Is there something I can help you with?”

Panic was filling her head with a dull buzzing like a beehive. She knew what they were here for. She knew exactly what they were looking for.

And he was getting out of school in thirty minutes.

Her palms were cold and clammy when she rubbed them together. When the dreary sun came through the window behind the couch, it hit Pepper’s pale face in such a way that she appeared to be made of stone. She was devastatingly beautiful. Too beautiful to be sitting in a ripped armchair that was in the apartment when they moved in.

“We’re here to talk about Peter,” said Pepper. Her eyes made May feel like a butterfly pinned to a cork board.

No wonder she was named Woman of the Year in 2013, May thought. She’s fucking terrifying.

“Peter?” Her voice cracked on his name. “What about him?”

Tony spoke next. “We understand that you’re his Aunt, correct?”

She nodded mutely. In her mind, she started writing her final will and testament. To Peter, I do not leave my undying devotion and loyalty to my family. Because that doesn’t get you anything but trouble.

“What can you tell us about his parents?”

There was something under his voice. Something that made May pause before she answered. She knew this wasn’t just a house call—she knew what they wanted to hear. But dare she go out and say it? Would it help her if she didn’t even bother trying to lie?

“I—not much. I’m his mother’s sister. Little sister. I wasn’t that close to them near the end—not since I was in high school, actually. I didn’t even know I was his guardian until they died. Um, I know that they were both smart. Really smart. That’s where he gets it, I guess.”

“Yeah, I can't do this.” Pepper leaned forward. “You know Peter isn’t yours. He isn’t Mary and Richard’s. He’s ours. Mine.” Her nails dug into the armrests. Maybe they would leave little crescent moons after she left.

Her heart. Was trying. To leave. Her body. Being sick and hearing all this on the same day was the worst feeling she could imagine feeling in her whole history of feeling things. May blinked away some black spots a couple of times, feeling like she was going to pass out. She wished she had some water. Licking her lips, she opened her mouth and—

The front door opened. “May, I got the goods! Two sandwiches, one with no mayo, both with no olives because olives are shit. Do we have any orange juice?”

Peter’s voice drifted out of the kitchen, along with the rustling or takeout bags. Everyone in the living room froze, gawking at each other.

Oh, I’m gonna throw up.

After slamming the door behind Peter, May rested her forehead against the wood for a few seconds and took big, gulping breaths. In one sharp movement, she turned and faced Tony and Pepper.

The latter had started crying. She leaned into Tony like a tree into the wind in a storm. Tony himself was looking a bit teary eyed. The man bent over a bit and whispered to his wife, hands working at her shoulders.

Finally, he looked up again. Looked at May. He shook his head and merely asked, “Why?” His voice was rough, cracking under the pressure of eleven years worth of questions.

Like the drop that tipped the basin, May slapped a hand over her mouth and started weeping. “He’s all I have,” she said. “I’m all he has. Please don’t take him from me. Please, please, I’m his only family.”

“How dare you?” Pepper jumped to her feet like there were hot coals under her. Her voice jumped a few notches, bouncing off the thin walls. “You aren’t his mother, you didn’t give birth to him, you aren’t his family! You stole him from his family! You—you—” She broke off suddenly, cheeks flushed. The woman turned to Tony, eerily calm, and breathed, “Call the team.”

May sobbed louder. “No, no, please, you don’t understand, I didn’t—I just wanted him to be safe—please don’t to this to him—!” She stumbled forward, using the butt of her hands to wipe away her tears.

Tony shook his head, rubbing Pepper’s shoulders. He completely disregarded May in favor of speaking quietly to his frantic wife. “I can’t do that, honey, you know how we wanna take this. Just breathe, okay?”

She grabbed his wrists tightly, whispering through her gritted teeth. “Call them, Tony, I don’t care, just get them in here now.”

“I can’t do that, Pepper. If I call them in, then the agents are gonna find out, then our tech team will find out, then our IT will find out, then our PR will know, and then everyone’s gonna find out. How long after that do you think HYDRA will find out? SHIELD? Nothing stays hidden, you know this. There’s no way to do this right now without it being all over the news in—in a week, tops.”

The two go back and forth for a bit while May leans against the wall, mumbling nonsense and trying to stop crying. Her heart was choking her, her loyalty was choking her, her sister’s debt was choking her. This is what you get for sticking with family, she thought.

Suddenly, Pepper whirled around as if to attack her, but Tony yanked her back. He framed Pepper’s face with his shaking hands and said, “I know you want her in jail, honey, I know. We have to be careful about this but I promise you—I promise you—that we’ll get our boy back. I promise you.”

May watched the couple move close to each other, one crying, the other shaking like he was caught in a snowstorm. She knew, in her heart, that nothing would ever be the same. Big things were coming, and it was all her fault.

Beyond them, in the living room window, rain started to fall. As if the sky was crying for the lost boy’s return.

Chapter Text

“Hey, do you know where I put my charger?”

“You ask me this every single time you lose it, and I never know the answer. Why would I know where your charger is, Peter? I can’t even find my own comb. Last night, I used a fork to fix my hair.”

He groaned, dropping the pair of jeans he was looking under. “My phone’s below twenty percent. If it dies, I’m writing you out of my will.”

Ned’s snort of laughter came from Peter’s dresser, where his phone was set. There was a crackling noise, followed by crunching. He was eating popcorn and M&M’s, his favorite snack.

“You shouldn’t even have a will, Pete. What are you leaving me?”

“My shoelaces.”

“Aw, man. I was really holding out for your giant Iron Man poster.”

Peter threw his phone a dirty glare. “I haven’t had that poster up since eighth grade and you know it.”

A knock came from the other side of his bedroom door, and May stuck her head in. Either she was still feeling a little sick or she had been crying, because her face was pale and there was a lot of redness around her eyes and nose. It had been two whole days since Tony Stark and Pepper Potts were in his living room. May had avoided all the questions Peter threw at her and refused to talk about it.

“Hey, little man,” she said teasingly. She stepped in and leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms.

He motioned for her to give him just a second and scooped his phone up, making sure to turn it off speaker as he did so. “I’m gonna call you back, Ned, okay?”

“Sure. Keep looking for your charger.” Ned hung up and Peter put the phone back before turning to face his Aunt.

“What’s up, May?” He mimicked her pose; leaned against the dresser and crossed his arms.

She smiled—it didn’t reach her eyes—and asked, “How do you feel about a vacation?”

“What do you mean?” On their budget, vacations were few and far between, and had to be planned months in advance. He wondered if this had anything to do with the visit.

“I mean a vacation. I got some extra cash, I was thinking maybe the Caribbean?”

He stared blankly at her. “I’m out of school in like, two months. Do you mean during summer?”

May shook her head. She glanced at her watch, probably worrying about the time. Her shift at the hospital was starting soon. “No. I mean now. We could leave on Friday, hang out for a while.”

Peter uncrossed his arms. He scratched the back of his neck; awkwardly stepped forward. “May—is everything okay? I mean, is this because of the whole . . . the visit thing?”

“No! No, of course not, Pete. It’s—New York is just so suffocating, you know? Maybe it’ll be nice to get out of the house for a bit. Take a break. What about Florida?”

He stared at her blankly. Before he could say anything, May strode in and dropped a kiss on his forehead. Maybe it was just him, but she seemed to linger for a moment, as if reluctant to pull away. When she did, her eyes looked teary.

“Pack a bag,” she told him.

Nat rubbed the towel over her shoulders, still breathing hard. Whenever she wasn’t on a mission, she was training new recruits, and though she was loath to admit it, sometimes they kicked her ass. Agent 23 in particular was very talented—she should look into getting her moved into a more experienced group.

She rubbed the back of her neck and groaned. All she wanted was a hot bath and some nice pajamas. Maybe she could talk FRIDAY into—

“Nat!” A hand reached out and yanked her into the supply closet she was passing. Without hesitating, she grabbed the man’s wrist and started twisting until he was yelping in pain and slapping at the back of her hand. “Let go, you psycho! It’s me!”

Nat blinked. Sam Wilson grimaced at her from the shadows of the supply closet. “Sam?” She dropped his wrist and shoved him by the shoulders. “What are you doing, sneaking up on me like that?”

He rubbed his wrist petulantly. “What are you doing, attacking people like that? You just hurt whoever says your name?”

“I attack people who pop up out of nowhere and try to drag me into dimly lit, abandoned closets, yes.”

Sam waved his hands as if dismissing her stance. “Doesn’t matter, that’s not why I need to speak to you.”

“What do you want?”

He leaned in so close that she could see the flecks of gold in his eyes. “Did you tell?” He asked, in so soft a voice that it may have been passed over had she not been listening so intently.

“Did I tell? About . . . ?”

He nodded.

“No!” Nat glanced over her shoulder, checking for any stray ears. “Of course I didn’t tell—did you tell?”

“No!” Sam crossed his arms and started bouncing his leg, full of nervous energy. “But I heard talk that Pepper and Tony had gone to visit their son, so I kinda figured that somebody had to have told someone.”

“Who’d you hear say that?”

“Bunch of secretaries.”

Shit. If the secretaries knew, then everybody would know. How did they find out?

Natasha ran her hands through her hair, thinking. “What happens if Tony finds out we went through his stuff?”

“I dunno,” Sam said with a helpless shrug. “He’ll lose his mind.”

They stared at each other in unanimous stress for a moment before Nat nodded and carefully said, “So we don’t tell him.”

You could see the gears click in Sam’s eyes. “We don’t tell him,” he agreed.

Right when their hands met to shake on it, the vent in the ceiling came away and Clint Barton dropped in. “You guys seriously went through his stuff? That’s pretty ballsy.”

Nat punched him in the shoulder. “I told you to stop doing that!”

Sam pressed a hand over his chest and let out a breath. “Holy shit, dude, you scared the shit out of me!”

The archer looked between the two, lips pursed. “Don’t worry. I already told my wife. And Steve. Let’s not tell Tony, yeah?”

The three exchanged looks before Natasha nodded. But she had barely opened her mouth to speak when the closet door opened and Steve Rogers came in, dragging a bored looking Bucky Barnes behind him.

“There’s not enough room in here for this!” Sam protested as the two wedged themselves inside. He was pressed against the farthest wall, next to the cleaning solutions.

Steve crossed his arms and asked, “Have you guys heard the rumors, too?”

“Uh, yeah, dipshit, everyone’s heard. That’s why we’re in here.” Clint looked like he was suffocating in his corner of the square.

“Actually, we’re in here because Sam was freaking out,” Nat said.

“I still am!”

The door opened once more, hitting Steve in the small of his back and forcing him to take a few steps forward. Wanda came in, Vision trailing behind her looking slightly apologetic.

Everyone squeezed themselves as far back into the closer as possible to make room for the couple. Vision managed to wrestle the door closed while Wanda tried not to drown in her teammates. “You all heard, then?”

Various noises of confirmation. From the back, Sam’s voice said, “It’s too small for this many people! It ain’t right!”

“I’ve been sensing some distress from Tony and Pepper for about a week now,” Wanda confessed. Her big eyes flickered over the group. “I didn’t think that much of it. But a couple of days ago, it took a big spike. What happened on Monday?”

The groups lapsed into silence before Bucky said, “They left for the day. Didn’t come back until really late.”

“Where did they go?” Asked Clint.

“An apartment complex in Queens,” said Vision, surprising everyone. When he was met with shocked stares, he added, “I heard the receptionists talking about it. No one in New York can do anything without being seen, it goes doubly for Pepper and Tony. They seemed to believe they were visiting their . . . Peter.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Steve said. “They can’t go two feet without someone accusing them of finding Peter.”

“Yeah, but this time it’s actually right!” Sam wiggled his way out from behind Clint so he could address the captain.

Natasha pressed her fingers on her left hand to her temple, massaging away her headache. She could feel someone’s elbow digging into her spine. She was pretty sure her right hand was on Wanda’s ass. The closet was really not big enough for all of them. “Everyone, quiet!” She snapped.

Clint stopped trying to wrestle Sam into a headlock and stared at her guiltily.

“We need . . . We need to keep this quiet,” she said. “He can’t know.”

“Who can’t know what?”

Everyone froze as the door opened once more and Tony squeezed himself inside. He looked between them all, confused. His phone was clutched in his hand. “Who?”

From the corner of her eye, Nat saw Clint try to pull himself into the vent. Steve grabbed him by the belt loops and kept him on the ground.

Sam slunk back into the corner, staring at his fingernails.

Coward.

Vision shifted slightly, standing in front of Wanda. Bucky stared at the ground, motionless, a virtual statue.

“Nothing, Tony,” Nat says. She stepped forward so she could smile reassuringly at him. “Don’t worry about it.”

His eyes narrowed. Flickered over the faces of each person crammed into the closet. “You guys planning something?”

“Of course not! We were just chatting,” said Steve. An uneven grin—sloppy parallel to Nat’s—charmed his face.

Nat mentally facepalmed. He might have been God’s honest soldier, but damn if he wasn’t bad at lying.

After a moment’s thought, Nat grabbed Tony by the arm and started hauling him out. “Just go to bed, Tony. It’s getting pretty late. Where’s Pepper?”

He struggled, but only slightly. For the most part, the engineer was happy to be led into the hallway. He was already distracted by his phone lighting up. “I don’t . . . know.” A small furrow indented itself in his forehead.

“You should go find her. I’m sure she’s wondering where you are.”

Tony stepped out of her grip, still staring at his phone. He glanced up only to say, “It’s really funny how I pay for this tower, and your equipment, and all the security cameras and microphones in this place, and yet you all still think you can keep secrets from me. Don’t bother telling me what you guys were whispering about, I can just check later. I’ve got more important things to do.”

A chill went down the spy’s spine. For a moment, he looked dark. Maybe scary, from the right angle. And also—how could she forget about the fucking cameras? The whole place was bugged to high heaven! Spies could be around any corner, she should have known better than to trust Sam to pick a secure location.

Even from afar, the threat of HYDRA was still messing up her plans.

Before she could gather herself to counter that, Tony was stalking off, holding the phone to his ear. She heard him bark, “Talk to me, Fri,” before he turned the corner and was gone.

Nat turned to stare at the closet door. Still open. Six pairs of uneasy eyes stared back at her.

“We’re fucked, right?”

“Shut up, Clint.”

“I’m telling you, Ned, it’s crazy!” Peter held the phone to his ear with his shoulder while folding a shirt. “It’s like I wasn’t even talking—she totally steamrolled over me.”

“So, you’re just leaving? What about school?”

“She says she’ll say there’s a family emergency or something. I dunno. Something about this feels really bad.”

“Well, she is mysteriously packing you guys up and skipping town just days after two of the world’s richest people were in your apartment. It’s pretty suspect. Have you tried talking to her about it?”

Peter finished the shirt and grabbed some jeans off the floor to fold them. “About the visit, yes, but I didn’t really have a chance to talk about the vacation. She had to leave for her night shift basically as soon as she told me what was happening.”

“Huh.” Ned paused for a moment before speaking again. When he did, his voice was slightly higher, like he was trying very hard not to set Peter off. “Do you think she did it on purpose?”

“Did . . . what on purpose?” He paused in his struggle with his jeans so he could listen more.

“Do you think she might have timed it so that you didn’t have time to argue with her? I mean, if you had the opportunity to use your puppy dog eyes, she coulda caved.”

The jeans slipped out of his hands. Peter stared blankly at the wall. Thinking. Debating. Carefully mulling over what he knew.

“Peter?”

At the sound of his best friend’s voice, he realized that he had fallen silent. Peter flinched and picked up the jeans again. Instead of folding them, he just balled them up and threw them on top of the pile of clothes in his suitcase. He picked up the phone, which had fallen onto his bed when he flinched, and assured Ned that he was fine. “It’s just that—well, I think your puppy dog eyes theory is bullshit, but there might be a valid point. I mean, she tells me everything, even gross stuff that I wish I hadn’t asked about, and she’s keeping me out of this. She kicked me out of the apartment when Tony Stark and Pepper Potts were over. She’s been dodging my questions all week. And I’ll bet you ten dollars that she won’t tell me why we’re actually leaving!”

Ned hummed thoughtfully. “But . . . I mean, it’s May. She once crawled through a stall window at a fair to get you a bag of cotton candy after they closed. What could she have done?”

“I remember that,” he said. A smile spread over his lips despite the solemn situation. “I just don’t understand. Everything—everything is so confusing. What should I do?”

“Um. Considering I once tried to eat an orange without peeling it to see if it would taste better, I don’t really think you should take my advice. Like, ever. But if I were you, I would just confront her straight up. Tell her you know she’s keeping something from you. And hey, if everything goes to shit, you can always crash at my place. Pretty sure my parents like you more than they like me.”

Peter nodded. His phone was at five percent. “Yeah, I—I think that’s a pretty smart idea. Thanks, Ned. I’ll text you later, after I find my charger.”

“Sure thing, Pete. Be safe. Don’t let the big, scary Auntie May kill you.”

Snorting, Peter hung up the phone and dropped it on the pillow next to his knee.

Something’s happening.

His Spidey senses doused him in chills out of nowhere. He hadn’t felt his senses go off this hard maybe ever. The closest he could think of was the time he got a gun pulled on him while helping an old lady cross the road—weird day all around.

Swallowing past the sudden lump in his throat, Peter got off his bed and crept slowly into the hallway. Usually his enhanced hearing would tell him when May was in the apartment—but she was supposed to be at work. And it didn’t smell like her.

He heard the floor creaking in the kitchen, quiet, muffled breaths. An intruder? Who would want to rob us?

Well, there’s only one way to find out. Wishing that he had some sort of weapon, Peter feigned ignorance and strolled into his living room.

Almost instantly, his Spidey senses screamed at him to duck—so he did. Right as a deafening gunshot went off and blasted a hole in the wall right where his head would be.

(For those who haven’t actually heard a gunshot in real life without earmuffs, warning, or a safe distance, they’re loud. Super loud. And for someone with hearing good enough to hear the downstairs neighbors making dinner, it was even worse. It felt like someone had shoved a screwdriver through his head.)

Acting half on instinct, half on fear, he rolled over and scrambled back so he was pressed against the wall.

The shooter appeared to be a tall guy dressed in all black—it was nearly a military outfit. Goggles covered his eyes, showing Peter’s own pale face in the reflection. In his gloved hands was a bulky gun—a gun he was reloading.

Peter dived out of the way as a second gunshot went off, narrowly missing him. A ringing took over his ears, a high pitched, baby-screaming ringing.

He scrambled to his feet, looking for some form of cover. His Spidey senses were going crazy, yelling at him as if he hadn’t already seen the fucking gun.

Army crawling to the couch, Peter desperately tried to think of a plan. He was outgunned, but was strong enough to stop a bus with his bare hands, and was faster without all the safety gear weighing him down. If he could manage to sneak up on the guy. . . .

It sounded like his attacker was reloading. Reloading and—shitfuckdammit—walking around the couch to aim at him. Peter went the other way, knocking his elbows against the floor. He hadn’t had to crawl like this since he was eight, playing hide and seek.

If he could just get on the wall—the roof—outside—behind him—somewhere where his fucking senses weren’t wailing at him—!

Actually, I might be into something.

When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that his attacker was paused, as if confused. There was one still moment where they stared at each other like statues. Then Peter latched onto the wall and crawled up like a spider.

I wish I had my web shooters right now. I wish I wasn’t being shot at. At least May isn’t here.

Peter ran-crawled past the dusty light fixture so he could be positioned right over the stranger. The stranger who was pulling out a small handgun and—fuckfuckfuck!

He was falling. He was falling, and he wasn’t in place yet, which meant that when he fell, he fell on the man’s shoulder instead of his head, bringing them both to the ground. From beneath the mask, Peter heard the gunman yip in pain.

Since I’m here. . . . With hair in his eyes, Peter swung his fists blindly. He was so panicked, he forgot to hold back so as to not seriously injure him.

His knuckles connected with the smooth planes of the man’s goggles, cracking the panels. A gloved hand closed over his wrist, yanking it away from his face.

The gunman was wrestling Peter into a tight grip, his legs closing around the teen’s to stop his wiggling.

Peter gritted his teeth and threw back his head as hard as he could in his awkward position. There was a satisfying crack, then warm liquid—is he fucking bleeding on me that’s so gross—dripped down the back of his neck.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” The gunman growled under his breath. “They didn’t tell me you’d be a fucking mutant.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Peter choked out. His fingers scratched over the arm around his throat. Looking for purchase on the metal buckles and thick fabric. When he looked up—much for lack of anywhere else to look—he saw the bullet hole in the ceiling where he had missed being shot.

Finally, he got a grip. Peter yanked the gunman’s arm off and shoved himself up enough to get an elbow right in his face.

He went limp.

Panting, heart pounding, ears ringing, Peter rolled off the man. “You dead or something?” He tilted his head enough to see that his attacker looked passed the fuck out.

If he strained his hearing enough, he could hear the slow heartbeat proving that he hadn’t accidentally killed him.

He could also hear multiple pairs of pounding feet—probably the police. No doubt everyone in the building had heard the shots fired.

“Shit.” With a sigh, Peter got to his feet. All the blood rushed to his head, making him sway in place. He raised his hand, which seemed to weigh a thousand pounds, to his hair and attempted to straighten it out.

No sooner had he sat down in his favorite armchair did the door slam open, and a group of cops invaded his living room.

Peter didn’t bother greeting them. They were already swarming around the unconscious body like ants around a soda puddle. One branched off to examine the window locks—he actually looked kind of familiar.

Holy shit, is that the cop from the alley?

Without even noticing, Peter slouched over until he was almost eye level with his knees. He knew, theoretically, that it was impossible for the cop to know he was Spider-Man. That didn’t make it any less scary.

As if he heard the teen’s thoughts, the officer in question turned and looked directly at him. His eyebrows furrowed. He opened his mouth, and Peter could feel his heartbeat in his throat—

The door opened a second time. A smaller group of very professionally dressed people strolled in. They looked much more put together than the cops.

Who the hell are they?

“Who the hell are you?” Asked the alley cop.

“Who’s in charge here?” The news ones ignored him and spread throughout the room like spilled water.

All the police officers stilled. They didn’t seem like they knew how to answer until the cop Peter recognized stepped forward. “Officer Perkins. Can I help you?”

Officer Perkins tucked his thumbs into his belt and puffed out his chest. Peter could practically smell the testosterone. He looked like a proud enough man without having himself be undermined.

The woman who had asked who was in charged stepped forward as well so she was nearly chest to chest with Perkins. She had a strict bob and a hard glint in her eyes. Though she barely came up to his shoulders, she looked rather like she could eat him alive. “You can. By leaving, preferably.”

“Excuse me?” Perkins’ eyes darted around until they landed on someone—a fellow cop looking confused. They exchanged looks for a few seconds before Perkins said, “You can’t just kick us out. This is our crime scene.”

“Not anymore. This is under SHIELD’s jurisdiction now. We appreciate your help, but we’ll be needing you to leave the premises now.” She pulled out a badge and flashed it in his stunned face before putting it back into her pocket.

“What the fuck,” Peter whispered. He looked back and forth from the SHIELD agents herding the cops out of the room to the showdown on the stained rug.

Before anyone could go on, two people pushed past the small bottleneck at the door and rushed into the living room.

Tony Stark and Pepper Potts.

Peter slunk down even more, not particularly wanting them to see him. He kind of wished he had just crawled out his window when he heard noises—how was he going to explain how he took down a thousand pound intruder dripping with weapons?

Pepper was clutching Tony’s arm and staring at him again. Tony was staring down the hallway—probably into Peter’s messy room. A red flush stained his cheeks when he remembered how dirty it was.

Officer Perkins drew the attention to him again by throwing his hands up and barking, “Now wait just a goddamn second, you can’t kick me out of my case! I want to speak to whoever the hell told you to come down here.”

The woman nodded briskly. “Well, look no further.” She stepped to the side and looked pointedly at the couple hovering on the edge of the action.

I wish I had popcorn. This could be dinner and a show!

For the briefest of moments, the cop actually looked thrown off by the sight. But he and his masculinity recovered enough for him to walk over and get up in their faces. “You two may be rich, but you don’t call the shots here,” he said through clenched teeth.

Tony rolled his eyes and detached from Pepper, walking around Perkins like he was a lamp. “Anyone search the apartment?” He asked.

She shook her head. “I was about to get Agent 12 on that, after I dealt with him.” The ‘him’ was punctuated with a jerk of her chin.

Before he knew what he was doing, Peter stood and blurted out, “Don’t bother. He’s the only one in here.”

The room fell silent as all agents, cops, and billionaires stared at him. Some looked so surprised that Peter wondered if they even knew he was in there before he spoke. He shifted under their eyes. Twisted his fingers in the hem of his shirt. “Besides,” the teen continued, “if there was anyone else, they probably would have come out to back up GI Joe down there when he got knocked out.”

“And how did he get knocked out?” Asked Perkins.

Stupid Peter.

Lucky him, though, for he was saved from answering by the arrival of one May Parker. She was crying, and still in her scrubs from the hospital. Completely bypassing the enforcements in her apartment, she ran across the room and held Peter to her chest tightly. “Peter . . . Peter. . . .” She cried into his hair like she used to shortly after he came to live with her and Ben.

“M’fine, May. He didn’t hit me.” But he knew she worried, so he returned the hug gratefully.

When he managed to disengage from his Aunt, he saw Tony staring at them with an unidentifiable look in his eyes. Slightly reckless, slightly devastated, slightly livid.

A chill skittered up his spine. His Spidey senses, mostly silent since the police had arrived, now started buzzing in the back of his head. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Pepper make a gesture towards a knot of SHIELD agents poking around in the kitchen. They returned it and headed towards Peter and May.

May must have seen it too. Or she saw Peter’s face shift—she always knew how to read him. All of a sudden, she was clutching his arms and staring at him with wide, rabid eyes. “Don’t listen to them,” she ordered in a whisper. “Whatever they tell you, don’t listen. I love you. You’re my only family—they’re lying to you.”

He never got the chance to ask what she was talking about. The agents separated them too quickly. Before he knew it, before he could resist, he was being herded out of his apartment and into the hallway. They marched him into the elevator and ignored all of his questions.

They ignored him all the way down to the first floor, out of the building, and into a big car with tinted windows parked in the back.

Peter clutched the passenger seat headrest to support himself as he interrogated the driver. “Where are we going? What’s going on? Why are Pepper Potts and Tony Stark involved with my Aunt? Is she okay? Is she in trouble? Who was that guy in my apartment? Is he HYDRA? Is that why SHIELD is involved?”

The driver, who was looking more and more annoyed by the second, snapped, “I don’t know any more than you do. Sit down and put your seatbelt on.”

Night had taken over. The driver switched his headlights on and pulled into an empty side street.

Peter stayed silent for five seconds before he was leaning forward again and asking, “Do you know Tony Stark? Did he ask you to drive me somewhere? Do you know why he was my apartment the other day?”

“Tony’ll tell you everything at the tower. I can’t tell you anything, because I don’t know anything. My job is to take you to the tower, not to be your personal Google.”

Peter barely noticed his stutter slipping into his speech. “The tower? As-as in the Stark tower? Well, it’s the Avenger’s tower now, right? Why are we going there? Is May in trouble? Are we-e going to meet the Avengers?”

The driver silently pressed the partition button. The tinted glass cut off any more questions Peter might have lobbed at him. He was left staring at his own wide eyes, splotched cheeks, crazy hair.

His stomach was churning. With no one to talk to, he was left with his own thoughts. That was never a good thing. He was lucky he didn’t eat anything that night, because otherwise he might have thrown it up. When he went to scratch the back of his head, he felt the dry blood from where his attacker had bled on him. Swallowing past the nausea, Peter used his stubby nails to scrape it off and flick it onto the posh leather seats. He almost felt bad about it.

The ride past smoothly. Quickly. Silently. He counted lampposts, then people wearing hats, then stray cats, then recited pi in his head to calm down. Peter was so focused on his own thoughts that he didn’t notice that they were pulling into an underground parking garage—a private underground parking garage until they went over a speed bump.

He looked up. Gawked at all the fancy cars for a few seconds before he realized what they meant.

Peter was finally at the tower.

Chapter Text

I'm coming back to this story. Hopefully, y'all will accept me again. I am currently rewriting the chapters already published to update them to the new-ish plot I have (main things haven't changed) and to fit my new writing style better. Once I've rewritten them up to the last one I published, I will begin re uploading them for you all to read again (strongly recommend, because things won't make sense if you don't). 

After that, I'll start posting the new new chapters and hopefully get this story done. 

Thank you for your 3-year long patience. I hope it'll be worth the wait :)