Chapter Text
2010, 9 years old
Nya crept up on her father, excited to show him what she had been working on. For the past month, she had been building a robot - which she had named Wall-E. Just twenty minutes ago, she had figured out how to wire Wall-E so that it could whir across the floor on its own. Nya was hoping her father would forget that it was currently two hours past midnight.
“Dad! Dad! Look what I accomplished!” Nya cried as Tony Stark swiveled back in surprise. Too late she noticed he was wearing a gas mask. Too late, Tony realized that he threw the material he was working with up in the air - exposing his child to a raw, radioactive element.
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“What the hell, Tony? It’s 4 in the morning!” Tiana shouted angrily. She had just finished a rotation at the Metro-General Hospital, where she worked as a cardiothoracic surgeon. She had wanted to sleep directly after, but several frantic calls from a certain Tony Stark later - Tiana found herself at the Stark Tower.
“I don’t know, I thought she went to sleep, Christ, I tucked her in myself! She figured out how to make that stupid robot move - and wanted to show me. I should have never let her watch that wretched movie, maybe then she wouldn’t have been exposed to this! I’m an awful father figure, I don’t know how-” Tony rambled on and on - tear tracks growing steadily. Tiana pulled him in for a hug. If it hadn’t been for a one-night-stand all those years ago, their paths would have never been so tangled. Now, they saw each other at least once a week - to switch off on Nya-Parenting duty.
Tiana realized that yelling at Tony wouldn’t do any good, so she turned to find her baby. They kept a hold on each other as they looked in the glass of the medical wing - seeing Nya’s braids lying still. Seeing her black skin 6 shades lighter than it should be. Nya’s lips without a mischievous smirk. Her eyes closed, instead of filled with wonderment. Hands laying still. It was unsettling, if not downright frightening. Tiana let out a sob. It would be a long night.
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“Cool” Nya breathed out, her first thought in this strange place. It wasn’t a room, or a field, or anything that had definite shape. It simply existed.
“Welcome, child” Someone wearing a strange costume appeared.
“How did you do that?” Nya asked, eyes wide.
“You’ll understand soon enough. Call me the Ancient One. I plan on taking you under my wing for a period of time. You aren’t stable enough to go out into this world, especially at your age.” The Ancient One spoke, slowly but clearly. It was as if she thought Nya was incompetent.
“Oh Ancient One, Ancient One! Wherefore art thou, Ancient One! Deny thy father and refuse thy name; or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I'll no longer be a Stark.” Nya recited dramatically.
“I can’t wait to rid myself of you already.” The Ancient One muttered.
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“30. Am I done yet?” Nya asked, sweat dripping off of her. The Ancient One had assigned Nya a set of exercises to grow her powers, but Nya found them extremely tedious. Today, she was snapping a couch in and out of what she now knew as the Spatior.
“Yes, child. That will do.” The Ancient One looked up from her Tai Chi.
“I have a name, you know. Would it kill you to use it?” Nya grumbled.
“Yes.”
“When do I get to go home? My parents will be worried about me.”
“As I’ve told you time and time again, only your spirit is on Kamar-Taj, and time moves differently here. You have only been gone for 3 or 4 days in their time.”
“I still miss them.”
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Nya ended up training for 6 months at Kamar-Taj. But she emerged with the ability to teleport, and she was able to shove anything into the Spatior - simply by moving a circle with her fingers, and opening a portal into it. She could travel into it, whenever she needed to retrieve anything.
The portal glowed orange, the same as a Sorcerer’s portal - and when she teleported, she emitted a yellow light, and with a pop , she was gone.
Her parents didn’t let go of her for weeks - she was comatose in their eyes for seven days.
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2012, 11 years old
“I didn’t even qualify for this program, and now you want both me and my child? Nu-uh, no way.”
Less than 30 minutes later, Nya and Tony were on a Quinjet, leading up to the Helicarrier. Nya wasn’t sure she wanted to know what her father’s girlfriend had whispered in his ear, but she thought that this mission seemed fun. Her dad never let her do anything fun with her powers, except train. She was going to be able to wear the suit he had designed for her, for the first time.
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“Nat!” Nya barreled towards the Black Widow, who promptly scooped her up in her arms.
“Hey buddy! Are you still smarter and more powerful than your father?” Natasha said, releasing Nya from her death-grip.
Nya giggled. “No one’s smarter than Daddy!”
“Well that’s disappointing. Do better.” She said through twinkling eyes.
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Nya, Tony, and Bruce Banner were gathered in the lab. Tony was trying to find files on SHIELD, while Nya was interrogating Bruce.
“A lot of diseases have molecular mechanisms. Biochemistry allows us to understand the molecular process of different underlying conditions. For example - cancer is a fascinating condition to study because-”
“Wait, so you and I have mutated DNA?” Nya interrupted.
“You could call it that. Mutants occur because high exposure to elements result in a frameshift mutation to a strand of DNA. You were exposed to Vibranium, for me, Gamma radiation. Now, these mutations in our DNA can come with grave side effects, which you and your father will need to be cautious of.”
“Bruce, she’s 11! She doesn’t need to be worrying about this!” Steve Rogers was standing in the doorway.
“Ah, Capsicle! Blueberry!” Tony looked up from tinkering behind a computer.
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“Wait! I need to talk to you.” Bruce panted as he caught up with Tony.
Tony turned around. “Yeah, Green Goddess?”
“I don’t want to worry you right now, but when Nya gave me her spit sample, I analyzed her DNA. There are some pretty alarming shifts that occurred because of the vibranium accident. She now has markers for multiple chronic illnesses. Most of them shouldn’t develop until puberty, so you’re safe for a little while longer. I figured you should know. I’m truly sorry.”
Tony paled. He hadn’t stopped feeling guilty about the accident, and this news added insult to injury. “Well shit”, he muttered, losing all ability for snark.
“The same thing happened to me when I began transforming. Contact me when she begins feeling symptomatic, I would love to be there for her as she’s going through this.”
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Nya and Natasha looked at each other as Bruce transformed into the Hulk.
“Nat, I need you to lure him towards me on 3. Okay?” Nya shouted through the noise. Nat looked at her like she was crazy, but did as she was told. Nya opened a portal into the Spatior, and trapped the Hulk inside it. He quickly shrank back down to human size, Nya theorized that it was because he was in a different dimension.
“We can go back to the helicarrier if you think you could stay in human form?” Nya asked, looking awkward.
“I think I can, thanks.” Bruce seemed very interested in his toes.
She teleported them both out of the Spatior - and to where Tony and Captain America were.
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“Why does this suit smell like a new car?” Nya asked as she zoomed around Manhattan. Her assigned job was clean-up-crew, so she was placing rubble into the Spatior, large swaths at a time. She had water in the Spatior somewhere, so she was able to douse out any flaming buildings. A skyscraper fell, and she saved the entire building. She then opened a portal into New Jersey, and each person that was still in the skyscraper was able to return safely to ground.
“You haven’t worn it before. It’ll lose the smell eventually.” Natasha replied over comms.
“If you say so, Nat.”
“Flaming building near Madison Square Park” Tony grunted. “I hate these things.”
“On it”
“Does she always pick up after you?” Thor rumbled, chuckling despite the truth behind his words.
“I need someone to give the Hulk a boost in 12 seconds.”
“Coming!”
“SMASH”
“Barton! What if I open a portal for your arrows? Then you could have the accuracy of short-range, but each arrow could go further?”
“Worth a shot”
“Hey kid! Remind me again why you can’t use your portals to store all these?”
“I have to go back to the Spatior at some point. I don’t want all these loose. Even if I did, I could never get them all.”
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Nya sat, crying silently as she watched her Dad. Thinking that a loved one is dead can do that to a person.
“Do you think we should try this new shawarma place? I saw it earlier - and it looked really good” Tony said absentmindedly.
“Sounds good.” Nat replied softly. Nya jumped. She hadn’t realized that the rest of the team was here.
Over the next few days, more news reports showed the new team, the Avengers. They were showing 7 of them. Nya was astounded to see that she was being recognized as one of them. Fury counted her as a junior member, due to her age, but the general consensus was that she was just as much of a hero as her father. Newscasters were calling her “The Raven”. She liked it - it was fitting.
She eventually returned the buildings she displaced to their original spots, and the amount of money to rebuild the city was shockingly high. Nya had to keep reminding herself that without the Avengers, the city might have been destroyed completely. Every day, a different person would be interviewed on their experience being “saved by Raven.”
Her parents had always been secretive about her identity, the press didn’t even know Tony Stark’s daughter’s name until she was 7. But she had taken off her mask after the battle ended, to hug her Dad. Someone took a video of it, and now the word was out that Nya Stark was a mutant.
Nya had been worried about hate crimes at first. It wasn’t everyday that the world had a black, 11 year old girl as a superhero - or that two Avengers were from the same family. If anyone did have anything against it, neither of her parents let their daughter see it. It was hard enough to be a middle schooler.