Chapter Text
“So why are we here?”
“It’s a bookstore. I like books.”
“Name any book.”
“Uh. The Lion King.”
Harley laughs, then hooks his arm around Tony’s. “All right. You convinced me. Let’s go inside.”
The store looks precisely how Tony remembers it. Nooks and crannies, exposed brickwork, a beamed ceiling, rows of bookcases in dark wood. He almost expects to see a familiar face behind the register, but of course it’s not. Just some middle aged man with a remarkably round face and a large mustache.
Harley lingers next to a dark wood paneled door with a sign that says ‘staff only’, and nudges it open to peer inside. The boy has a bad habit of snooping, and Tony has not yet decided if he should chastise the kid about it or leave that to his actual parental figures. “Come on, Dora the Explorer.”
They gravitate towards the science section, although it becomes quickly apparent that the signs nailed to the sides of the bookcases are entirely meaningless. All they find is rows of cook books.
“Maybe on the higher shelves?” Harley suggests, craning his neck. “You know, because only complete nerds like us are ever really interested in reading science books?”
“Let’s see.” Tony’s foot finds a protruding edge in the bookcase and he pushes himself up, balancing against the bookcase, climbing even higher—
“Excuse me? Excuse me? Hey. Fumblefoot.”
Tony twists his back a little to be able to look down at the teenager standing behind him. Employed teenager, it appears, from the name tag on his shirt.
“You’re standing on Mr. Dickens’ face, sir,” the employed teenager says. “Not cool.”
Tony glances down at the copy of Great Expectations he is currently using as a footstool. “My bad.” He climbs back down.
“We don’t offer indoor rock climbing here,” the kid continues. His nametag says Peter. “There’s a gym three doors down.”
“All right, Pumpkin eater,“ Tony says. “Didn’t the store owner teach you to be polite to customers?”
Peter glances back at mustache-man behind the register. “Julio Pringles over there? Nah, he doesn’t care. What do you want from the top shelf? I can get a step stool.”
“We’re just looking for books on astrophysics, really,” Harley says.
“They’re in the self-help section,” Peter says, without even having to think about it. “Follow along.” He leads them further towards the back of the shop and then points, wordlessly, at a section of books on a lower shelf.
“Thank you,” Harley chirps.
“Take your time. But you step on it, you bought it,” Peter says, off-handedly. And disappears again.
“Good help is hard to find these days I suppose,” Tony says.
-
They go for drinks across the street. Harley sips his lemonade, wipes his hands on his jeans, leafs through his new book to look at the pictures. He’ll probably have stained the pages before they even get home. “I could have paid for them,” he says. He had been fumbling around for his wallet when Tony already swiped his credit card next to him.
“Be faster next time, then,” Tony says.
“I’ll pay you back,” Harley says, mouth set into an actual pout.
“Harley, I’m paying for your stuff, we’ve been over this.”
“That’s food and clothes. This is extra. I’m only staying with you for a bit. You’re not responsible for me.”
The doctors have given Harley’s mother anywhere between two months and two years. Tony moved her into the best care facility he could find, right here in New York. Harley’s summer break has started, so he just moved into the tower for now, to be close to her.
“If you give me a single dime,” Tony warns, “I will buy you those expensive clothes you hate, the ones that have the brand name written across them in offensively prominent lettering. And force you to wear them.”
Harley giggles, even as he shudders at the thought.
Tony looks down at his cup of coffee, rubbing his thumb around the rim of it. “I want to tell you something that might sound a bit crazy.”
“Boy, if you think it’s crazy.”
Tony smiles.
“Shit, you’re actually nervous,” Harley says.
Tony lifts the cup to take a sip. Changes his mind and puts it back down. “So here’s the deal,” he says. “Here’s what’s rumbling in the back of my mind. That bookstore we just came from, I knew the previous owner. Her name was Mary. I got her knocked up, and then waved all my parental rights while the bun was still firmly in the oven. Didn’t even take a peek in the oven. Never saw her again, never saw the kid. Don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl.”
“Say all that again,” Harley says, “but slowly, and using way more words.”
“It’s almost sixteen years ago so the kid will be… only a few months older than you. Fifteen and a bit. She told me about the pregnancy when she was three months along.”
“Are you sure it was yours?”
“What do you think was the first thing my lawyers did back then? Hire a whole team of private investigators to prove that she was, uh, promiscuous. Which she wasn’t. And she never asked for money, anyway. Once it became clear we couldn’t prove she was a liar or a con, I did the next best thing I could come up with, signed away all parental rights, wrote her a cheque and had her sign a stack of NDAs.”
“Okay,” Harley says. “That’s fine. You were an asshole back then. But you shut down you weapons factory, got over your misogyny, and now you save the climate and people’s lives and take in poor little almost-orphans such as myself. This is just the final part of your redemption arc, right?” He smiles, brightly. “Like Steve Harrington taking a bat to the Demogorgon at the end of season one.”
“You know I don’t watch Game of Thrones.”
Harley facepalms. “You’ve said a lot of bizarre things today, but that sentence that just came out of your mouth was peak Tony insanity.” He lowers his hand and looks up at Tony. “So is that why we’re here? You were quietly hoping she still owned this place, sixteen years later?”
“It was worth a shot.”
“Why can’t you just have FRIDAY—”
“That’s the thing. She can’t find anything. There’s something shifty about her government records, they provide very little information, not even a current address. And there’s diddly-squat about any supposed child.”
“Oooh. The plot thickens. Maybe she gave the baby up after all?”
“Even then, there should at least be medical records of the pregnancy, birth records, whatever.”
“Sheesh, Tony,” Harley says. “You had to go for the double spy infiltrator whatever. You couldn’t just have knocked up a nice, girl-next-door type classy lady with an office job and a cat.”
“I thought she was! Honestly, compared to the women I usually ended up with back then, she was exceptionally sane. I met her in that book shop. She liked Virginia Woolf and long walks on the beach. Not emotionally damaged in any way, so I still don’t know what compelled her to sleep with me.”
“You were probably a lot better looking back then,” Harley says, wafting his hand in a circular motion that encompasses pretty much all of Tony.
“None taken.”
-
Harley is a snooper. Even before he moved into the tower, his main hobby appeared to be opening every drawer and cupboard to see what’s inside. Tony doesn’t particularly mind the snooping when it’s conducive to Harley’s learning process.
Harley likes learning; soaking things in like an overexcited knowledge sponge. Tony, against all his own expectations, likes teaching. They can happily spend hour upon hour in Tony’s workshop, where Harley goes through all his drawers, and then they take appliances apart and then put them back together.
“So what’s next?” Harley asks as he fumbles around with a motherboard.
“We install a CPU on there.”
“With Mary, I meant. There’s a new owner at the bookstore. So how are we going to find her? Where do we find a hot lead in this cold case?”
This became a ‘we’-thing quicker than Tony had anticipated. “You watch too much TV, Dora the Explorer.”
“You don’t get to say that when you just revealed you had a mystery baby with a secret identity ghost-lady. That’s straight out of Sherlock Holmes. Come on. I want to meet the heir to the Stark throne before I leave.”
Harley is supposed to move in with his aunt Tammy and uncle Chris in rural Pennsylvania once school starts again. Tony is not sure how he feels about it. He has the impression Harley always goes for his fake-happy voice when he talks about them.
“I suggest the Cinderella approach,” Harley says. “We make a public announcement that we are looking for the missing Stark heir. Lots of fifteen-year-olds will claim it’s them, and then we figure out a way to find the real one. We make them race each other.”
“How would that tell me anything?”
“Entertaining, though.”
-
Fury passes the file over to Agent Roessler. She opens it and flips through, glancing at the pictures, then up at him. “Spider-Man.”
“I want you to bring him in. We’ve been lenient long enough.”
She puts the file on the table, lips pursed in aversion. “I’ve been at the agency for twelve years now, sir, and I do believe I have proven myself over the years. I was hoping for something a little more high profile than a local vigilante.”
“A vigilante who is more elusive than expected.” Stark, Rogers and Romanoff all failed at bringing him in, though Fury has a simmering suspicion that their attempts were rather half-hearted. They seem to have a soft spot for the spiderling. Roessler doesn’t do half-hearted, or soft spots. She has no moral compass. An excellent quality in a field agent. “If you think it will be easy, get the job done and prove yourself.” If he is perfectly honest, he doesn’t even believe Roessler will succeed. The higher play is simply that Roessler will cause enough mayhem, draw enough attention to Spider-Man that the vigilante piques Tony Stark’s interest.
And when Tony Stark’s interest is piqued, he goes on a hunt. All Fury will have to do is sit back, and watch the catch play out.
“Prove yourself. And then I’ll bring you onto whatever project catches your fancy.”
“I want in on operation Rhinestone in Johannesburg.”
“Whatever project catches your fancy.”
-
“Home!” Peter calls out as he drops his keys into the ceramic bowl. He hangs his coat and takes off his shoes, lining them up against the wall. May’s shoes are always all over the hallway. Peter grumbles as he neatly sets them aside, too.
He finds May stretched out on the couch, feet propped up on the arm rest, a laptop balancing on her legs.
“Are you watching Peppa Pig?”
“In Italian,” May says. “It’s educational.”
“Why does the place smell of burnt food?”
May looks guilty.
“Did you try cooking again, Poppin’ Fresh? I told you not to. You’re going to burn down the whole apartment building.”
“Yes, boss,” she says. “Come here and be lazy with me.”
“What about dinner?” Peter asks, already opening and closing cupboards.
She rolls her eyes. “I’m thinking a bag of chips each. I got dinner, Peter. Come here and tell me about your day.”
Peter moves closer and wriggles his way onto the free space on the couch, propping his feet up next to May’s. “Tony Stark walked into the book store this morning.”
“Did you get a selfie?”
“I was too busy stopping him destroying our books.”
She snorts. “Did you lecture him like you always lecture me?”
“I was appropriately reproving.” He doesn’t need some ignoramus traipsing all over the books that used to be his mother’s pride and joy. Not even a famous genius superhero.
“Hm-mm,” May says. “What about this afternoon? You were on the news.”
Anxiety rears its ugly head. “Yuck, really?”
“It was fine, just a small piece about you saving a taxi driver from his wrecked car. Very neutrally worded. I didn’t even have to send any trolling comments.”
Whenever a news outlet writes something scathing about Spider-Man, May takes to the internet to drag the journalist through the mud, using the twenty-something different usernames she created for this very purpose.
The media attention, and its relentless focus on blowing up every tiny mistake he makes, is by far the biggest downside of being Spider-Man. Worse, by quite a margin, than having to deal with insane villains and stalker Avengers.
“So everything good?” May asks, squeezing his hand.
“Yes. Good. Just wish people would stop caring so much. I’m not even doing anything that special. You save more lives on an average day than I do.”
“Maybe if I went to work every day in a costume and did backflips in the hallways, I’d make the news too,” she says with a twitch of lips.
A reluctant smile spreads across Peter’s face.
“I brought you a broken infusion pump from the hospital that was going to get thrown out,” May says. “It’s in that box over there. Thought that might be something new in your collection.”
“Nice.”
“So you can add a feature to your drone that pumps sedatives into criminals.”
“Spider-Man would be lost without you.”
-
Harley is a man with a mission.
He enters the book store and makes a bee line for the register in the far corner. The only one there is the teenager who, quote unquote, helped them yesterday. “Hey,” Harley says, brightly. Peter, he reminds himself, glancing down at the other kid’s name tag.
“Hey,” Peter says, and leans to the side to glance down one of the rows of bookcases. “Did you bring your big friend, the booktrampler? Is he kicking stuff around in a corner somewhere?”
“Wow, you hold a grudge,” Harley leans across the counter, so far that he can curl his fingers around the other side and peer down. “Are those the newest releases?”
“For staff’s eyes only,” Peter says, wafting his hands in a ‘step the hell back’-motion. “Stop snooping around. What do you want?”
“I was hoping to speak with the owner.”
“He’s doing admin in the back. What’s it about? I know everything about the books in here, so…”
“It’s not about books. Just have some questions.”
Peter arches an eyebrow at him. “All right, Scooby Doo. Let me see if he wants to come out.”
He disappears through a backdoor and returns in under a minute. “He’ll be here in ten,” he says, and starts stapling papers together. “How’d you like Katie Mack’s book?”
“Haven’t started on that one yet.”
“It’s a really weird mix between depressing and upbeat. Describes all the most likely scenarios for the eventual demise of our universe. Big freeze, big crunch, big rip, the bounce. What do you like about astrophysics?”
“Don’t really know yet. Tony got me into it. Everyone in my own family thinks reading is dumb, so…” he shrugs. “Why is this store such a mess, anyways?”
Peter looks affronted. “Excuse me?”
“All the books are in the wrong place.”
Peter points at him with his stapler. “They are not. All the books are exactly where they are supposed to be. You just don’t have book-finding skills.”
“Hey. You’ve worked here a long time, I’m guessing?”
Peter shrugs.
“So maybe you knew the previous owner? A woman named Mary Fitzpatrick?”
Peter’s eyebrows draw together. “What do you want with her?”
“Just hoping to get in touch.”
Another customer steps up to the register and Peter turns away from him to scan her items. Of course they are all presents for various grandchildren, and Peter wraps them each in a different color wrapping paper, and curls ribbon with a pair of scissors, and talks the lady into buying some magnetic bookmarks as well.
And then finally turns back to Harley. “Never heard of her. But if you tell me what you want, I can ask around.”
“It’s complicated.”
Peter frowns again and opens his mouth, but the door behind him opens and the owner steps into the shop. “This is him I suppose?” he asks, looking Harley up and down.
“Uh. Yeah,” Peter says, and turns away from them.
“You own the store, right?” Harley asks, bouncing a little closer to him. “I need to know about the previous owner. Her name was Mary Fitzpatrick.”
“What exactly do you want to know?”
“I’m just hoping to get in touch with her, uh—” he strains to remember the name Peter used for him, “Mr. Pringles.”
Peter makes a weird sort of choking sound and dives down to rummage around in a box full of greeting cards.
The owner looks slightly puzzled, but says: “Oh. I never met her. She left the bookstore quite abruptly, I believe. There was still cash in the register.”
“Do you know if she had any family?”
“I don’t know anything about her, I’m afraid. Sorry to disappoint.”
“It’s fine,” says one heavily disappointed Harley. “Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.”
“Buy a book?” Mr. Pringles suggests. “We just got some new zombie hunter novels in the Y/A section.” He points at the book case marked autobiographies.
“I’ll have a look. Thank you sir.”
The man disappears through the back door.
“Mr. freaking Pringles?” Peter hisses, shooting to his feet. “Why would you call him that to his face? Trying to get me fired?”
“I thought that was his—”
“It was a reference, dude. A nickname. You familiar with that concept?”
“Oh. Yeah. Tony does a lot of nicknames, too.” And Harley doesn’t always understand them, or doesn’t understand them until about an hour later, by which time it is too late to think of a comeback. “Is that a New York thing or something?”
Peter rolls his eyes and goes back to his stapling. “So what do you want with Mary Fitzpatrick, Scooby doo?”
“Doesn’t matter anyways. Thanks for indulging me.”
“Hey,” Peter says. “If you like astrophysics, there’s an exhibit at the museum of natural history right now about life on other planets, that’s supposed to be good.”
“Supposed to. Have you been?”
“No, it’s expensive. But I think Tony Stark can afford to get you a ticket. When he isn’t too busy destroying books.”
Harley grins and leans his elbows on the counter again. “You know what. If I get him to invite you. Will you forgive him?”
Peter pauses mid-staple and blinks at him.
“My name’s Harley, by the way.”
-
“There you go,” Peter says. He spins the front wheel of the bike. The dynamo buzzes and the light jumps to life. “All fixed.”
“Thank you Spider-Man!” the girl chirps, and clicks her helmet back in place before taking off down the sidewalk, wobbling precariously around a black van that pulls up next to them, and almost falling over again when the door of the van is slammed open.
“Careful there,” Peter says.
The woman who stepped out spares a cursory glance at the girl and then looks straight at him, and the back of his neck starts prickling. Peter takes a precautious step back, moving out from under the store canopy so he has space to swing up.
“Emily Roessler, SHIELD,” she says.
“Oh, ha,” Peter says. “I talked to a co-worker of yours a few weeks ago. He didn’t like me much.”
She widens her stance, one hand resting lightly on the taser gun in her holster. “I’m going to ask nicely; once, only once. SHIELD has given you enough warnings. If you claim to be on our side, you need to stand down immediately and come with me, so we can negotiate the terms and agreements of your… employ.”
“That wasn’t very nice at all,” Peter says. “Try again.”
“Step into the vehicle, nice and quiet, and I won’t be forced to—"
“Boooo,” someone says, and they both turn. A young woman is standing a few feet away from them, eating a burrito, watching them with a rather detached expression. “Leave Spider-Man alone, lady,” she says. “He’s our guy. This is nonnuya business.”
“Hey, thanks,” Peter says, at the same time that the SHIELD agent snaps: “Do not interfere, ma’am, for your own safety!”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “I feel very unsafe.” She takes another bite of her burrito.
Roessler unholsters her taser gun with what she probably thinks is lightning fast speed and thrusts it forward, straight at Peter’s chest.
Peter steps to the left.
She jabs again, and Peter steps right, then bends his knees and jumps clear over her, landing on top of her van.
The woman with the burrito chuckles, and Roessler sends her a fierce glare.
“You know what I did today?” Peter says, and starts counting on his fingers. “Prevented a car crash, helped a lady clean up her front yard, fixed a girl's bike. Meanwhile, there’s probably people trying to steal our nuclear codes or something. You all need to get off my back and move on to something more productive.”
“Get down,” Roessler says. “You’re making things worse for yourself.”
“We’ll see.” Peter straightens, fires a web at a flagpole and launches himself into the air.
-
Fury glances at the video footage on his screen, and then looks back at Roessler who stands on the other side of his desk, fuming. “Proving to be harder than expected?”
Determination spreads across Roessler’s face. “Don’t you worry, sir. I’ll get him.”