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It was on a Thursday, that Tony got the message.
He’d had a lab-day with Peter scheduled. Peter should’ve appeared over an hour ago, but the kid made of sunshine hadn’t made it on time. Tony blamed the kid’s dubious decision to use the underground, instead of asking Happy for a ride.
When Peter would eventually show up – panting, red in the face and stumbling over apologies for his tardiness – Tony wouldn’t take pity and cut him off, this time. He’d listen to the whole entire, painful stuttering spiel in satisfaction, before telling his mentee/pseudo-son ‘I told you so’, because he in fact had told the kid all about the unreliability of public transport. Besides, the kid’s refusal to use the private driver Tony had fixed him with was frankly rude.
Peter would suffer the humiliation of having to admit that Tony was always right and Tony was going to enjoy every single second of lording it over the easily flustered teen.
When Tony got the message, he was almost disappointed. Receiving the vomit of apologies over text was by far less satisfying than getting to witness it in real life. Still, he opened the message just in case Peter was in actual trouble and requesting back up.
Turned out it was a video message, and Tony actually smiled when he discovered that, because perhaps that meant he’d get to actually hear Peter’s voice and see his face as he admitted Tony’s superiority, after all. The mechanic stilled, dropping the screwdriver he’d been holding with a loud clang, when he saw that the video wasn’t sent by Peter at all.
Instead of his intern's happy face, he was met with a video coming from an encrypted location, showing a balding Hydra-scientist looming over his passed out kid like a creep. Panic spread through Tony’s body like a burning poison. The little shit looked vulnerable like this. Younger. Without wasting even a second, Tony hit play.
With every threatening sentence muttered in that god-awful German accent, he felt his heart sink further and further in his chest, until he was certain it must’ve dropped all the way to soles of his feet by now. “FRI…FRIDAY, please tell Nat and Barnes to come down here. Immediately.”
“Right away, Boss.” Friday responded, sounding unusually worried.
--
“What’s up Tony?” Asked Natasha, as she waltzed into the lab not two minutes later, taken aback by his summons.
Tony Stark’s lab was sacred. Being asked down was a rare occurrence. Even Pepper and Bruce found themselves locked out occasionally. Actually, the only one that came down here regularly that Natasha knew of – and she was very observant, she was world’s greatest spy after all – was Tony’s kid-intern Peter Parker, whom he’d acquired sometime in between what the media had accurately dubbed the Civil War, and the reconciliation of the team.
Natasha faltered just a little, when she saw Tony’s pale complexion. “You okay?” She asked gently, softening her voice in worry. “Should I call Pepper? Or Rhodey?”
Tony swallowed heavily as he tore his eyes away from the screen he’d been fixating on. “N-no.” He said, voice sounding hoarse. “I’ve got… I’ve got a situation. Let’s wait for Barnes.”
Now Natasha was really concerned. “You asked for Bucky?” She silently made a small SOS-gesture behind her back, aimed at the camera she knew FRIDAY used to surveil the room. She’d discussed the sign with the intelligent AI at length and FRIDAY had agreed to discretely summon Clint and Steve – the people she trusted most out of all Avengers – to come to her when she used it.
“Yeah.” Tony whispered, without elaborating further. He turned his screen, so Natasha could see what he was looking at.
Only years of training stopped Natasha from flinching at what she saw. On the screen, stood a paused video depicting a man dressed in a white lab-coat. Hydra’s symbol was stitched to the front. But that wasn’t the most concerning thing. The man was stood next to a heavily reinforced chair and bound to said chair, was Tony’s precious little intern. Knocked-out cold.
“Дерьмо…”
Tony’s pale complexion and stony features suddenly made a whole lot of sense. Behind her, the door opened, revealing Bucky, Steve and Clint. “What’s up?” Asked Clint, as he came to a stop at Natasha’s side.
Natasha gestured wordlessly to the screen. The archer followed his friend’s gaze and stiffened. Bucky leaned forwards to look over Natasha’s shoulder and when his brain finally accepted the sight in front of him, he let out a string of curses. It was a testimony to how taken aback Steve was, that he didn’t comment on his friend’s slip of the tongue.
“Tony…” Asked Steve hesitantly. “What’s going on? Who…?”
“His intern.” Said Natasha immediately.
Tony didn’t even question how she knew that, even though Natasha knew he’d gone to great lengths to hide Peter from them all. Instead he just restarted the video from the beginning, looking tense and worried.
The camera work was shaky, before it steadied. The camera zoomed in, on the kid, slumped unresponsively in his uncomfortable-looking chair. “Tony Stark, Iron Man, I’m talking directly to you.”
The lab-coated stranger roughly grabbed the kid’s lolling head, raising it to show the slack, pale face of a bloodied Peter Parker. Clint made a chocked sound in the back of his throat and Natasha stepped closer to him, knowing that for a second there, all Clint saw was his boy; Cooper.
Tony glanced nervously from the screen, where the abductor unceremoniously dropped Peter’s head, which lulled limply to the side, to his teammate. He had seldom seen Clint Barton so mad. The archer’s fists were balled so tightly that the skin around his knuckles was strained white, a vein on his forehead was pulsing manically and his eyes were spitting fire at the screen.
Then, having greater worries than his teammate’s rapidly rising blood pressure, he turned back to regard his kid. Peter didn’t look like he was merely sleeping. The kid was deathly pale and his floppy brown curls were plastered to his sweaty face, making Tony worry about infected injuries, even if he couldn’t find a visible wound that indicated he was badly hurt or bleeding out, like his washed out cheeks seemed to suggest.
“He’s a tough one. Put up a good fight. We had to sedate him multiple times and he only stopped struggling when we plunged a knife in him,” Tony’s blood ran cold even though he’d heard the careless words once already.
Clint and Natasha sucked in heavy breaths.
“That’s messed up.” Said Bucky quietly from beside Steve.
“He isn’t mine.” Tony whispered, panic flooding him so suddenly he kind of froze up, watching the screen breathlessly. His eyes found Natasha’s: large, desperate and pleading. “What if they took him because they think he’s mine? They’re going to shoot my kid, Nat, because he isn’t biologically my son.”
Steve stepped forwards and put a calming hand on Tony’s shoulders. Tony shrugged him off agitatedly, as the video progressed.
“Peter here,” Hydra-scientist was saying. “is a miracle in more ways than one. First of, he’s Spider-Man, which we knew about. Don’t worry, we’ve got him suitably contained, with Vibranium to accommodate his super strength.”
“Oh, that explains so much.” Natasha said, eyes flitting from Peter to Tony, kind of hating herself for not figuring it out sooner and then hating herself again for worrying about that in a time of crisis. Tony rightfully ignored her, as well as the disapproving frown on Steve’s face.
“Before I’m going to get into the second reason, though, the reason Peter is here, you should call James Barnes and Natasha Romanov to join you. I’ll be waiting.”
Natasha deducted that Tony had stopped the video at this point before.
“Now, you might’ve wondered why I called your resident Russians to watch this message with you. They don’t know sweet, polite Peter Parker after all.” The man bared his white teeth in a smile without any warmth. “Well, let’s just say that – because of their shared past – they’re more involved than even they know.”
The statement left everyone in the room uncertain and somewhat unsteady as confusion, impatience and anticipation thrummed hotly beneath their feet. Natasha glanced at Bucky and arched a questioning eyebrow. His answering shrug made him appear as clueless as she felt.
“Let me tell you the story of my life’s work, as a Hydra scientist hired for a project in collaboration with an organization that you might’ve heard referred to as the Red Room.”
Oh. Oh no.
“What Natalia Romanov, the Red Room’s darling, may or may not have told you, is that during the graduation ceremony, she was sterilized.”
Natasha hated the pitying looks that were immediately thrown her way. She could feel them itch upon her skin like a scratch she couldn’t rid herself of, even though she didn’t bother looking up and meeting any of her teammates’ eyes. She grit her teeth, wanting to snap at the man and demand the relevance of bringing up her sore past.
“What dear Natalia probably didn’t know, is that in some special cases, the operation involved an extra, highly confidential, step.”
Before Natasha could even arch eyebrows in confusion or brace herself for whatever was to come, the man carelessly dropped the bomb that left her ears ringing.
“The most promising Widows went through egg retrieval before their sterilization, for my special breeding program.”
For a moment, the world seemed to have screeched to a halt, as the meaning of the words sank in. Clint was the first to shatter the silence, when a small curse spilled over his lips.
The sound forcefully tore Natasha from her stunned stupor and she recoiled away from the screen, all training in guising her emotions forgotten, as her heart stuttered in her chest. The shocked whimper that caught in her throat made her sound vulnerable. More vulnerable than she would like to be.
A breeding program. Using our eggs. Without our permission or even knowledge.
Natasha felt like she couldn’t breathe. Panic unlike anything she’d ever felt before squeezed tightly around her chest, crushing and overwhelming enough to make her struggle as she frantically tried to slip her mask back into place.
It didn’t matter, she tried to tell herself as she furiously attempted to reign in her emotions and stop the panicked jumble of thoughts in her head from spinning out of her control. This was a video, not a facetime call. The only people to see her lose control, were her teammates. Her family. People whom she trusted with her life and weakness. People who understood.
Clint reached out to steady her, hand gentle on her shoulder, his hold loose so she could shrug him off if she decided she wanted space. She didn’t. She leaned into the touch instead, taking a couple of deep breaths and working through the shock and the bitter aftertaste the revelation left her with, before nodding at Stark, who’d had decency to pause the video so she could recover, but was waiting impatiently.
As soon as Tony had re-hit ‘play’, the screen stuttered back to life and the man on the other side of the screen smiled thinly, eyes cold. “For the best results, we used the DNA of our male asset, Winter Soldier, to create a perfect match with the crème-de-la-crème of the world’s spies.”
Bucky Barnes, who’d been standing rigidly off to the side with Steve until now, choked. Steve’s head snapped away from the computer to look at his friend in shocked horror.
Again, Tony reached out to the space bar to stop the video, but Bucky’s hand snatched out and grabbed hold of his wrist before he could. “Don’t,” Bucky said gruffly, staring at the screen with wide, intent eyes. “I can handle it. I need to hear what he has to say.”
When Tony hesitated, he nodded at the huddled form of Stark’s intern in the background of the video. “and so do you.”
Tony’s brown eyes travelled up to meet Bucky’s, narrowed and piercing, before his gaze darted back towards the unconscious Peter. Natasha saw that the man had to blink twice to see the boy clear. The pitiful sight he was presented with seemed to convince him and Tony nodded decisively and leaned back, allowing the video to play out without any further interruptions.
“Still,” the German-accented voice rang out. “our efforts appeared futile. Only ten of our viable embryos survived implantation into our loyal female agents, who surveyed as hosts. Only three were carried to full term and by the time we were done experimenting post-birth, only one survived into infanthood.”
Experimenting?
Steve made a distressed noise and Tony’s eyes flicked nervously to Bucky.
Bucky though, was staring stoically at the screen, face so blank that it made Natasha wonder whether the man was in active denial, or whether he’d actually allowed himself to truly understand the implications of what was being said. She wondered whether he understood that Hydra had made him sire three children against his will. Whether he’d realized that two of these children, his children, had been tortured to death.
“The surviving child, Natalia Romanov, was yours.”
Natasha felt her stomach roll, even though she’d been nervously expecting the direction this conversation was going in, since the first mention of the Red Room’s secret, extra procedure. She felt Clint’s hand on her shoulder tighten minutely. She wasn’t so sure she’d still be upright, if it wasn’t for Clint.
“Born Peter Parker, raised as the son of two of our top agents, Mary and Richard Parker, Peter was the only genetically satisfactory match strong enough to survive. Only he, had inherited his biological father’s super soldier genetics, though his powers were dormant and we – to our infinite frustration – never managed to discover how to activate them.”
Natasha could barely hear the man over the rushing in her ears. I have a child. I have a son. Peter’s my son. I am a mom.
“Mary and Richard decided to run from us before we could conduct further research to figure it out, stashing the child away in Queens with family they’d hidden from us.” The man’s lips curled in distaste. “At some point his adoptive parents must’ve gotten too attached and forgotten the importance of their mission.”
“But no matter, they got what was coming for them and as it turns out, it was Peter’s fate to become as extraordinary as he was bred to be.
At the age of fourteen, Peter Parker was exposed to a lethal amount of radiation, after being bitten by a radioactive spider. To save his life, his Super Soldier genes kicked in, as a defense mechanism. Based on our data, we believe he’s about twice as powerful as our Asset ever was.
Without knowledge of his parentage, Peter Parker incorrectly assumed he’d received his power from the spider, because of the spider bite. After losing his uncle, the boy decided to do good with his powers. Spider-Man was born.”
Natasha shook her head in silent denial, mind flashing with memories. Every interaction she’d ever had with Tony’s little mentee flashing before her eyes. There weren’t many. There weren’t enough. Never enough.
Her son. Hers.
“Of course, playing superhero attracts some attention, including ours. Tracking him down was easy. After you, Stark, managed before us, it was even easier to find the kid. The intern cover story you came up with was so transparent and unimaginative that I admit myself disappointed.”
“Now, Hydra as a whole might be gone, but Peter Parker was our life’s work. Some, might say, he’s rightfully ours. There’s so much we could do with a young kid possessing the powers he has. He might not be as young and impressionable as we’d imagined when starting the project, but he’s still a kid. Personally, I believe he’s still moldable as clay, but even if he turns out to be made of stone, he’ll learn to obey his handlers. The hard way if necessary.”
Tony was shuddering with barely contained rage. Bucky Barnes still looked scarily stoic and still. Natasha couldn’t breathe.
“But then again, I’m not deluding myself into the belief that the three of you would ever let us rest. Even if we hadn’t uncovered the truth of Peter’s parentage to his biological blood, his pseudo-father Stark would hunt us down ‘till the end of the earth, before he’d give up on his adopted son. So, we must compromise.”
Natasha really, really didn’t have a good feeling about this. She didn’t think she’d like where this was going.
“We promise to not lay a finger on the boy, besides the occasional encouragements you might need to agree to our noble plan. In exchange, Iron Man will turn himself in to work for us and Winter Soldier and Black Widow will return to us. Will return to their missions. To life before they’d had their unexpected taste of freedom.”
Steve and Clint froze. Natasha felt rather than saw the influx of tension radiating from Barnes’ taut form. Tony… Tony just looked wrecked and resigned.
“It’s your choice. This little boy is the best of the three of you, so it is rather generous of us to even give you the option. With a bit of training he’ll be able to do plenty for us. He has Winter’s strength after all, his genius rivals Stark’s thanks to natural smarts and Stark’s mentoring. His instincts and fighting can be brought up to par with Natalia’s. After all, the talent for assassination is in his blood.”
Natasha felt her stomach spasm. It was the only warning she got, before she was forced to spin around and race to the nearest trashcan. She doubled over, falling onto her knees, before throwing up her last meal and the one before.
Even over her own retching, she could still hear the scientist’s mocking parting words: “It is your choice. Will you let him carry the burden all on his own, or will you sacrifice to relieve your legacy? I’ll give you some time to think it over and for Peter to wake up, before I… sent over some incentive.”