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Marc Spector was the kind of guy who always worked alone. He functioned better that way. It was easier to get the job done when he didn’t have to worry about the wellbeings and positions of everyone else around him.
Since moving to New York, however, he found he’d gotten less and less of a say in that. Missions Khonshu sent him out on often happened to coincide with missions the Avengers went on, much to his dismay. It was annoying, but it wasn’t like he could tell them to piss off or just flat-out ignore Khonshu, so he just dealt with it.
Still, that didn’t mean he had to enjoy it. He didn’t appreciate when others got in the way of his work.
And now, sitting on the Quinjet on the way back from a mission for a “briefing” he was pretty sure was just poorly-disguised code for “interrogation,” Marc was feeling that more than ever.
He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his temples, tilting his head up to the ceiling. God, he just wanted to get this over with. It was supposed to be an hour-long flight- they’d gone all the way out to some yeehaw-ass farm outside city limits to bust up some drug ring’s stash- and Marc was dreading the rest of it. Maybe he’d let Steven out just for shits and giggles. Sure, the team didn’t know about Steven, but it wasn’t like it was any of their business anyway. Plus, he didn’t really feel like dealing with anything at the moment. He just wanted to get back to his apartment and take a nice, long nap.
The seat next to him creaked. Marc peaked an eye open to see the Spider-kid sitting in some kind of weird squat-sit position, arms clasped around his legs. He grunted in acknowledgement and tilted his head back down so he could look out at the seats across from him, which were thankfully empty for the moment.
The kid was spacing out, which honestly wasn’t too much of a surprise. He looked pretty exhausted. If Marc hadn’t been feeling so tired himself, he might have asked if he was alright- no, scratch that, he wouldn’t have. Steven would be the one to ask that.
The kid suddenly snapped back into himself and adjusted himself so he was sitting normally. He looked at Marc, seemingly noticing him for the first time if the faint surprise on his face was anything to go on.
“Hi- sorry, where are we?”
Marc quirked an eyebrow up at that. Kid must have hit his head. “Quinjet,” he said, “on our way back to the Tower.”
He nodded. “Makes sense- sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
Which made sense, because Marc hadn’t given his name to anyone. “Marc,” he answered.
“Cool, cool. I’m Alex.” He stuck a hand out “Nice to meet you, Marc.”
Marc took the hand, a little tentative.
“So,” he said- did this kid ever shut up? “You’re new, yeah? Are you an official member?”
“Nah,” he said, leaning back. “We just happen to go to the same places sometimes.”
The kid- Alex- nodded. “Same here. I take it Tony told you?”
“About..?”
Alex gestured to himself.
“Yeah,” he said, looking away. Stark had told him the kid was young before they’d even stepped foot into the farm- something about making sure he didn’t get hurt. “It shouldn’t have been surprising. It’s kinda obvious, lookin’ at you.”
Alex squinted. “Really?” He scrunched his nose up. “Yikes. I should get on top of that, huh?”
Marc huffed out a humorless laugh. “Maybe. You never know what people could do with that kind of information.”
“Yeah, totally.” Alex sighed.
Marc could feel Steven teetering on the edge of his mind, and a question that definitely didn’t belong to Marc pressed to the front of his brain. “How old are you, anyways?”
“Depends. I kinda slide around a bit.”
“Sorry?”
“Oh- you’re probably new to all this,” Alex laughed, “I can slide between ages, basically. Youngest I ever go is like, twenty? Oldest is around twenty-six. Right now I’m somewhere in the middle I think. It’s still kinda fuzzy.”
Marc stared. “There’s no way you’re older than fifteen,” he scoffed.
Alex laughed again. “What, you mean like, the body’s age? We’re fifteen, sixteen in August. Jeez, Tony’s slacking. He’s normally a lot better at explaining things.”
Marc’s eyes flew open. ’He couldn’t be.. could he?’
“What do you mean, ‘we?’” he asked carefully, keeping his voice as steady as he could possibly make it.
“Oh-” Alex sat up, suddenly looking a lot more serious. “I thought Tony-? We have DID- it’s short for Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s basically-”
He gaped at the kid. ”What?”
“You might know it as Multiple Personality Disorder, but that’s outdated, nobody-”
“Kid, kid-” he waved his hands a bit. “I know what DID is.”
“Oh! That makes things easier then.” Alex cleared his throat. “Sorry, I totally thought Tony told you.”
“It’s okay.” He paused. “So who’s uh- who’s in control right now?”
“Fronting.”
“Sorry?”
Alex smiled. “It’s called fronting, sorry. That’s technically the proper term for it. And uh- I’m Alex. I use she/her, and I’m a caretaker.”
Marc furrowed his brow. “What does that mean?”
“It means I take care of the system and everyone in it- well, the littles especially, but I do a little bit of everything.”
“And.. what’s a system, exactly?”
Alex smiled, ever patient. “It’s all the alters in one body. So like, I as Alex am an alter, and all the other alters plus me are known as a system.”
“Right.” He furrowed his brow even further. “How many alters do you need to make a system?”
“Systems can have any number of alters,” Alex answered, “there’s no set number. Some have as little as two and some can have hundreds, or even thousands sometimes.”
“Right, right.” Marc’s head was spinning, and it was definitely not attributable to Steven’s presence in the back of his mind, although- he was starting to press a bit closer, and Marc could feel his brain going foggy, the way it did right before a-
“So like- you can have three alters and still be a system, right?” Steven asked, shoving Marc out of the front like an overexcited puppy.
Alex blinked at him, then suddenly seemed to come to an understanding. “Yeah, definitely!” she said, matching Marc’s enthusiasm. “Can I ask who’s fronting now?”
“I’m Steven Grant- and that’s ‘Steven’ with a ‘v,’” he answered. He stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, uh- Alex, was it?”
Alex took it. Marc watched them shake hands from the reflection in the glass across from the two. “Yep, that’s me! And you use he/him, right? I don’t wanna misgender you or anything.”
“Uh, yeah I think so.” Steven grinned awkwardly, rubbing the back of his head. “Sorry, I’m not used to, you know- I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else like us before.”
“Neither have we,” Alex laughed. “First for both of us.”
“Ye-p.” Marc nearly cringed at how awkward he sounded. “So, how many uh- how many alters do you have? If you don’t mind me asking, that is, I’m sorry if that was rude.”
“No no, not at all!” Alex smiled, sitting back in her seat. “I think..” she scrunched her nose up. “I think at the last count we had something like seventeen? I’m not really sure, I’m not in charge of that kinda stuff.” She sighed. “You guys have three, right? You, Marc, and someone else?”
“Three that we’re aware of,” Steven corrected. Marc shivered at the thought of there being even more alters he didn’t know about lurking somewhere deep inside. “There’s me, Steven. Then there’s Marc- Spector, Marc Spector. He’s a bit standoffish, but he’s nice enough once you get to know him.”
”Wow,” Marc drawled, ”I’m flattered.”
“Oh hush, you- sorry, Marc’s being a bit of a right twit.”
Alex laughed. “I get that. Spidey’s not being any better.”
“Spidey? Is he the one who does the swinging thing?”
“Yeah. We didn’t even know he did it until a few months ago.”
Steven huffed. “I guess that makes two of us.”
“So, anyways, you were saying-?”
“Oh! Yeah, sorry. Anyways. There’s Jake too, Jake Lockley. We only found out about him recently. He doesn’t say much, but he’s a cabbie I think? And he speaks Spanish.”
”He’s an asshole,” Marc grumbled. Steven pointedly ignored him.
“So, uh- who’s in your system, then?”
Alex whistled. “Oh boy, let me think.. there’s a lot.”
“Yeah,” Steven said, understanding. “We can barely handle three. I can’t imagine having seventeen.”
“It’s a bit of a challenge, but we make it work. Mostly.” She and Steven laughed. “Off the top of my head, there’s Peter, Spidey, me, Keagan, Iron Man, Finley, Kaylee, Wil, and Noah. The rest don’t come out that much, if at all.”
“So that’s-” Steven counted on his fingers.
”Nine.”
“-Nine alters that come out regularly? How do you even manage that many?”
“We have a schedule,” Alex replied. “Basically it has times and places that certain alters can come out.”
“What do you do if they come out when they’re not supposed to?”
“It depends,” Alex shrugged. “If they were triggered out, then we don’t really do anything. Maybe we calm them down or try to get someone else out if we need to.” Steven nodded along. Marc listened silently in the background. “If they come out on purpose, then we have a conversation.”
“Not a good conversation, I take it?”
Alex only laughed.
The door to the medbay slid open. All three turned their heads to look, and out stepped Tony Stark- the man himself.
“Hey kid,” he said, “and Moon Knight. How’s it hangin?”
“Stark,” Alex said, calmly. Stark stopped in his tracks, only a couple feet away from the seats opposite from them.
“Uh- Heeey, Alex,” he warbled. Then, he sighed, dropping his nervous demeanor. “What’d I do?”
“You didn’t think to tell your teammate here that we have DID? What if a little fronted while we were out? Or someone switched in and didn’t know where we were?”
“Yeah, sorry,” he said. At least he looked a bit sheepish about it. “We didn’t really have enough time.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “You’re forgiven, but don’t let it happen again, yeah? Clear?”
“Crystal.” Stark sat down, grunting and rubbing his back. “Ow.”
Marc could feel Steven’s question before he’d even said anything. ”He got slammed into a wall.”
“Ah. Are you feeling any better, Mr Stark, uh- sir?”
Stark raised an eyebrow. “What’s with the accent? You goin’ all Natasha Romanoff on me?”
Steven looked at Alex. “Black Widow,” she whispered.
“Ah.” Steven cleared his throat. “Uh, no. I don’t know how to explain, but..”
“Tony, this is Steven,” Alex said, interrupting his awkward attempt at an explanation.
“I thought you were American?”
Alex coughed. “He’s like us.”
Stark squinted. “Like you? Whaddyou mean?”
Alex dropped her face into her hands. “For a supposed genius, you’re really stupid sometimes,” she muttered. She raised her head up again. “He has DID too.”
Stark’s eyes shot open. “Oh- well, uh- that certainly explains some things.”
Steven chuckled nervously. Marc pushed forward again, sensing his discomfort at the situation.
“I can handle this,” Steven muttered.
”I know you can. But I WANT to handle it.”
Steven worried his bottom lip between his teeth, before he sighed. “Yeah, alright. Go on then.”
Marc pushed his way to the front, letting Steven fall back a bit- not far enough to where he was unaware of what was going on, but far enough back so that he couldn’t control the body. He felt his eyes flutter a bit and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and finger.
“Marc?” Alex guessed.
“Yep,” he groaned. “God. We need to stop switching so much.”
Alex laughed. “I know the feeling, believe me. Do you know what’s going on?”
Marc eyed Stark up, raising an eyebrow at the man. “Yeah,” he said.
“You should have let us know sooner,” Stark scolded- light, but still scolding.
“And what? Risk you guys throwin’ us in the loony bin? Yeah, not happening.”
”Marc,” Steven admonished. Marc ignored him.
“We would have understood.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” Marc barked out a laugh. “I’d rather ‘Earth’s Finest Heroes’ not think I’m batshit crazy, thanks.”
“Guys,” Alex sighed. “Tony, Marc’s right. It was his decision to make whether or not you guys knew. Not yours.”
“I know, but-”
“Ah-ah-ah. No ‘buts.’ They seem like they have a good enough handle on it. Plus, he’s an adult. He can decide things for himself.”
Stark grumbled, but luckily for them, he didn’t argue against it. “Fine, fine,” he muttered.
“Tony.” Stark looked up at Alex. Marc looked away. He was getting the feeling this wasn’t something he should be intruding on. “You can’t force someone to tell you something, even if it’s better for you to know. People with our condition- we’re heavily traumatized. The whole point of DID is to be able to protect yourself. Telling other people about it risks exposing someone to potential harm.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. He sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to feel like I was forcing you into anything.”
“It’s fine,” Marc lied in spite of Steven’s very obvious disapproval.
“No, it’s not fine. I should have been more understanding of that.”
“Yeah, you should have,” Steven said, shoving Marc out of the front. “But we forgive you, because you’re trying to learn, and you obviously feel bad about it.”
Stark chuckled. “Thanks, Steven.”
“Yep.” Steven tapped his fingers against the seat. “So, uh- how much longer til we get back?”
Aaand, nope. Marc threw Steven out of the front again. “Sorry, he’s shit at small talk.”
Alex and Stark both laughed at that. “It’s fine. He’s fun to talk to, don’t worry. It balances out.”
Marc’s lip quirked up in a lazy sort of half-smile. “When he’s not talkin’ your ear off about Egypt, sure.”
”Oi!”
“Nah, but seriously, thank you guys for being so understanding. It’s.. unexpected. But not unwelcome.”
Alex smiled. She grabbed his arm and shook it a bit. “Of course,” she said, “we systems gotta look out for each other, yeah?”
Marc rolled his eyes, but he gave a fond sigh. Across the aisle, right next to Stark, Steven smiled at him.
“Yeah. I guess we do.”