Chapter Text
NEW YORK
2016
tick. tick. tick.
Harriet Potter couldn’t help but think that waiting until the bell rang was twice as torturous for her as it was for anyone else, because her enhanced hearing meant that she ended up quite literally counting the seconds. The otherwise inaudible sound of the clock hand moving was for Harry a driving metronome—impossible to ignore.
Ms. Cooper was winding down her lesson, which was mostly review before the AP exams anyway, and so most of the class was barely paying attention. Archie was half asleep in the warm April sunlight pooling through the window. Ron Weasley was folding last week’s math test into a paper airplane. Even Hermione was doodling in the margins of her notes. Harry hid a grin as an unflattering sketch of Archie’s open-mouthed profile took shape under their friend’s pen.
The light rapping of a capped dry-erase marker against the whiteboard caused a listless stirring throughout the room. “If I could have your attention,” Ms. Cooper said dryly, “I’ve an announcement that might wake you all up.” She held up a stack of papers.
There was a more genuine stir of interest among the students as they all recognized the distinctive layout of a school permission slip. Harry noticed that the stack seemed thicker than usual, and narrowed her gaze at the forms—but Ms. Cooper’s thumb was obscuring the name of the destination. Harry would bet her favorite science t-shirt that it was deliberate. She elbowed Archie to wake him up.
“As most of you have guessed, we’re going on a field trip,” Ms. Cooper said with a grin. “But before I hand these out we need to talk a bit more seriously, because our destination is somewhere rather special.” Immediately, there was a shuffling as students began to sit up straight, putting on their best attentive, innocent faces. Even Dudley was paying attention.
“The AP Physics and Chemistry classes from Midtown won the tour lottery for a very prestigious STEM company. This is a rare opportunity for you to see some of the most brilliant scientists and engineers in their fields at work. There will even be a small contest at the end of the trip, which will offer you a chance to show off what you’ve learned during the tour. Needless to say, any bad behavior will reflect poorly on both you and the school.” Her tone made it clear she expected absolutely no bad behavior, and like a chorus, their heads all nodded: yes ma’am, absolutely no nonsense ma’am, we’ll be perfectly behaved ma’am. Ms. Cooper’s lips twitched into another grin.
“I won’t keep you in suspense any longer…we’re going to Prince Tower!” Harry flinched as her classmates broke into shrieks and cheers around her. Fuck. Fuck. This was almost as bad as another trip to Malcorp. She didn’t even know why she was surprised. How many “very prestigious STEM companies” were there in New York anyway? Of course it was Prince Industries.
“Hear that, Hairy-ass?” Her cousin Dudley thumped the back of her chair, and she turned a doleful look his way. “We’re going to Prince Industries! Maybe Prince will be willing to sign your stupid t-shirt. If you beg him.” Harry took a moment to be infinitely grateful that she’d rethought her original idea of publicly claiming a Prince Industries internship—even if, technically, she really did have one. Dudley already had more than enough embarrassing blackmail on her from growing up together.
“I am not going to wear an Iron Man shirt to Prince Tower,” she hissed, feeling her ears turn red. Dudley laughed in her face, which was rude of him, but nonetheless served as an adequate distraction from her burgeoning panic.
“Harry, Harry!” Archie was tugging on her sleeve, and she turned to look. “We’re going to Prince Tower!” He was beaming.
“We’re going to Prince Tower,” she repeated, deadpan. “On a field trip. To the place where Dr. Prince and the Avengers live.” She watched as the penny dropped, and his lips formed a silent oh.
Archie was one of only two people besides herself who knew that Spider-Man, Queens’ local masked vigilante, was in fact not a man—or even a boy—but rather Harriet Potter, high school sophomore, who liked Star Wars, nerdy t-shirts, and beating up criminals in her spare time. This by itself was not the problem, of course. The problem was that Dr. Severus Prince, Iron Man and owner of Prince Industries, believed that he knew who was behind Spider-Man’s mask. Dr. Prince had never met Harry Potter, but he spent quite a bit of time with Rigel Black, his personal intern and Spider-Man’s “secret identity”.
It would be very awkward if he discovered that Rigel didn’t really exist.
“I am going to die,” Harry said in the same flat tone. Archie nodded somberly.
“You are going to die,” he agreed.
“You two are both completely ridiculous,” Hermione huffed, and they turned to look at her. She pointedly held out the stack of forms Harry had neglected to pass back. “It’s just a school field trip. I agree that Harry would probably expire if she ever spoke directly to Dr. Prince, but the chances of him interacting with a school trip are low, to say the least. You’ll be fine.”
“You make a good point,” Harry said, cheered. She took one of the forms and passed the rest back to Dudley, who was trying and failing to pretend not to be listening. Casually, she said, “By the way, you’re coming to my place after school, right, Archie?”
“What?” Archie said, startled. She made a face at him. “Oh. Oh. Right. I forgot, we uh, we were gonna…”
“Lego Death Star?” Harry said helpfully.
“Right! That!” Archie smiled brightly. Hermione wore an expression that clearly conveyed why do I hang out with these losers.
“Didn’t you do that, like, months ago?” Dudley asked, abandoning his pretense of ignoring them.
“It got dropped,” Harry said shortly. Even months after Archie had discovered her in the spider suit, it was still a bit of a sore point between them—and while she’d promised to make it up to him by rebuilding it together, it had fallen by the wayside.
She was saved from having to explain further by the shrill ring of the bell. She winced, hand flying up to rub at her ear. In many ways she’d learned to love her spider-powers, but the same enhanced senses which had made for a hellish first month after the bite still plagued her from time to time.
Harry and the rest of her classmates joined the flow of students as they exited their classrooms, congesting briefly by the lockers before trickling out and down the front steps. Archie was chattering on to Hermione; Harry, listening absentmindedly, didn’t realize that Dudley was still with them until they came to an awkward halt by the parking lot. Harry and Archie always took the subway home, but Hermione drove her father’s beat-up 1997 Chevy Impala.
“Have fun with your…Death Star,” Hermione said, voice filled with irony. She slung her bag across her shoulder and departed, leaving Harry and Archie with Dudley. They looked at him in loaded silence. Dudley toed at the ground, heedless of the way it scuffed his shiny Italian loafers. Not like he couldn’t get more of them, Harry reflected with some bitterness.
“Say hi to Mum for me,” he said stiffly, not meeting Harry’s gaze.
“Yeah, sure,” she said after a pause. “Don’t say hi to Vernon for me. He wouldn’t appreciate it.” Dudley winced, then seemed to gather himself.
“Bye, losers,” he said, and swaggered off in the direction of his Audi.
“Sometimes,” Archie said, “I don’t know whether to envy him or pity him.”
“Story of my life,” Harry replied.
+++
“I’m home,” Harry called out as she unlocked the door to their apartment. “I’ve got Archie with me.”
“In the kitchen!”
Harry stepped inside, Archie trailing after her, and they found Aunt Petunia wearing one of her frillier aprons—a sure sign of her mental state—and carefully icing a three-tier cake.
“PTA meeting?” Harry asked, eying the confection dubiously. Aunt Pet made decent cakes, if a bit dry, but the precarious placement of the decorations made Harry fear an imminent collapse.
“Yes,” Petunia said with grim determination. “How is Dudley?”
“He’s fine. Excited about a field trip we’re going on at the end of the month. Friday the 29th.” That his excitement was at least as much over an opportunity to mock Harry as it was about the trip itself would remain unsaid. Harry and Dudley had a tacit agreement that as far as Aunt Petunia was concerned, they were still as close as they had been before the divorce. Ex-uncle Vernon had no such illusions, of course, but seeing as he and Aunt Pet didn’t talk except to trade vicious barbs over who brought the best desserts to the monthly PTA meeting (Vernon had a private chef, like the asshole he was), Harry rather thought he was unlikely to spill the beans.
“Field trip?” Aunt Petunia set down her frosting bag, and pushed her glasses up on her nose to look at Harry.
“Our school won a lottery to go to Prince Tower,” Harry explained. Petunia narrowed her eyes.
“You seem rather…unenthused.”
“I suppose I’m a bit nervous,” Harry said truthfully. Nervous was an understatement. She felt like she had snakes crawling in her digestive tract. “What if I see Dr. Prince? I’d definitely embarrass myself.”
Petunia scoffed. “He’s not worth your embarrassment, darling. That’s assuming he’d lower himself to interact with a student tour, anyway.”
“Hey, it could happen,” Harry said, a little stung. It was true that Dr. Prince was not known for his child-friendly demeanor, but he wasn’t as arrogant or cruel as some people made him out to be either. He’d made so much time for her and taught her so much as Rigel, and it wasn’t fair that people assumed that they knew him when they really didn’t. But Harry could hardly explain that to her aunt without explaining how she knew better, and that would require letting the spider out of the bag, so to speak—something Harry was avoiding at all costs.
“He actually does a lot of talks with college students,” Archie chimed in, eyes meeting Harry’s in silent understanding. “Midtown isn’t a college, but it is kind of a big deal as a STEM school. It’s not entirely unlikely that he might speak to our tour group.”
Petunia sniffed. “Well, in the not entirely unlikely possibility that you speak with him, I suppose you will have to rely upon the not entirely unlikely possibility that you will not embarrass yourself.”
“Touché,” Harry said, with a wry smile. “Anyway, Archie and I are gonna try to rebuild the Death Star. Good luck with your cake.”
“I don’t need luck,” Petunia said darkly, as though she could glare the frosting into submission. “This cake will be perfect if it knows what’s good for it.”
Laughing, Harry pulled Archie into her room. Pushing the door shut behind her, she collapsed against it, smile dropping off her face. “I am so, so, so screwed,” she said in quiet despair.
“Come on, don’t talk like that,” Archie said bracingly. “The whole point of Rigel is that no one ever looks any deeper. If they think they know who’s under the mask, they won’t look too closely at Harry Potter. Severus Prince has never seen your real face, right?”
“No,” Harry said reluctantly. “It was easy to work out the glitches with the UnderMask once I had access to Dr. Prince’s materials.”
The UnderMask was the secret to Harry’s ruse. When the Black Widow and Captain America had leaked AUROR’s files on the internet in 2014, Harry and Archie had—like most people, she assumed—taken a look for themselves. There were some things she kind of regretted knowing now, but one thing that had caught her attention was the set of partial schematics for something called a Nano Mask. They had frightened her, at the time; the thought that spies or HYDRA agents could disguise themselves as anyone they wanted had been the cause of a few nightmares.
When Harry had become Spider-Man, however, she’d remembered the Masks and immediately seen the potential. The schematics weren’t complete enough for the average person to do anything with them, of course, but Harry wasn’t the average person. She’d spent weeks not only tinkering with her web formula and shooters, but also trying to fill in the gaps in the Mask schematics. This was made even more difficult by her inability to get her hands on the kinds of materials she needed. In the end, she’d had to cannibalize a recent PrincePhone she’d found dumpster diving for the holographic card. She felt a little guilty about it, but it had let her build her prototype UnderMask—and just in time, too, for it had been less than a week later that Dr. Prince had tracked her down as Spider-Man and asked her to go with him to Germany.
The UnderMask disguised not only her face, but her voice—and so Severus Prince believed that Spider-Man was Rigel Black, a seventeen-year-old boy whose appearance was modeled after a blend of Harry’s and Archie’s features. Her original suit had been designed with padding that both offered some protection and obscured her figure, and she was careful not to wear tight clothing when they worked in the labs. She supposed she was lucky that she didn’t have much of a chest to speak of.
The suit Dr. Prince designed for her had been a bit of a sticking point for a while. She knew enough about Prince tech to guess that he had scanners and trackers in the suit, and had refused to wear it without a guarantee of privacy. Dr. Prince had not been pleased, but he’d eventually agreed to set parameters so that he would only be notified of serious injuries, and that the tracker would only be activated if she was in a life-threatening situation. Likewise, the coding was adjusted so that he couldn’t access more than basic information about an injury unless she gave her permission.
So far, Dr. Prince had kept his promises to respect her privacy. He’d also promised that the AI in her suit didn’t report to him or MINNIE. Harry had named the AI Marcus Flint (a private jab at one of her rogues that she thought was hilarious), and while Dr. Prince could check Flint’s records if he really wanted to, he evidently had not done so thus far—because it had been impossible to hide her real gender and identity from Flint.
Harry knew that Dr. Prince suspected she had a not-so-great homelife, and was hoping that if he respected Rigel’s boundaries, she would come to him and tell him the truth. She felt guilty about lying to someone who had done so much for her, but she was convinced that if he had any idea that she was only a fifteen-year-old girl, he’d be horrified. He might even tell Aunt Petunia, and that would be the end of everything—the end of Spider-Man—and Harry couldn’t bring herself to give up Spider-Man. So she was selfish, and so she kept her secret.
“So much of the ruse relies on Dr. Prince keeping his promise not to look,” Harry confessed to Archie now. “I know that he has no reason to think that Harriet Potter has anything to do with either Rigel or Spider-Man, but I can’t help but think that something will go wrong. What if MINNIE scans me when we go in, and tells him Rigel’s there? What if he thinks Rigel looks too much like me? I knew we should have used a stranger for the template.”
“It would have been really hard to get a good scan,” Archie pointed out. “Not to mention that I’m Filipino and you’re really fucking white. Rigel looks pretty different from both of us.” Harry scowled at him, but he wasn’t wrong. Between school and patrolling in the spider-suit, Harry didn’t get a lot of sun, and most people didn’t look past skin color when searching for resemblance.
“Okay. Okay,” she said. “You’re right. It’s going to be fine. I’m going to go to Rigel’s internship tomorrow and act as though everything is completely fine, because nothing is going to go wrong.” She put on her best, biggest, brightest smile. Archie glanced at her and pursed his lips.
“You are so screwed,” he said.
+++
Severus Prince—or, as he secretly still thought of himself, Severus Snape—looked up as his intern slunk into the lab. Rigel had come as himself today rather than as Spider-Man, he noted, judging by the baggy sweatshirt and ratty Converse, and the conspicuous lack of a multi-million dollar suit.
While Rigel was not generally someone Severus would consider bouncy (habit of swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper aside), he couldn’t help but notice that the kid seemed unusually subdued today. There wasn’t anything particularly striking about his body language, yet something about his posture suggested a sort of folding in on himself, as if he wished to become invisible, or to blend in with his surroundings. Idly, Severus recalled that some spiders were quite good at camouflaging themselves, and he wondered if some day a new power might be added to Rigel’s catalogue.
“Hi, Dr. Prince,” Rigel said, tone colorless. Severus raised an eyebrow, but decided it would be ineffective at best to ask.
“Hullo, Rigel.” He beckoned him over with two fingers. “Come take a look at this.”
Rigel’s approach was almost reluctant, but as he came close enough to catch sight of what Severus was working on, a spark of interest caught in his eyes. “Is that a widow’s bite?” Severus internally winced a little at the tone of repressed excitement. He had known Rigel long enough now to recognize that one of the only things Rigel thought cooler than the Avengers was a new piece of tech, and here were two of them combined.
well, a new piece of tech and an ex-Avenger, anyway.
He hummed an acknowledgement. “This one was damaged a year or two ago, and I found it when I was cleaning out a section of the workshop last week. I thought it would make a nice exercise for you.”
“Oh?”
Severus was pleased to see that Rigel’s usual enthusiasm had returned. He gestured towards the disassembled pieces of the device spread out before them. “Tell me what you see.”
Rigel’s gray eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “There’s a lot of parts here,” he said after a moment. “I thought the bites were essentially close-range tasers, but they’re a lot more than that, aren’t they?”
“Good. Keep going.” Rigel reached out towards the parts before stopping and glancing up, as if asking for permission. Severus nodded, and watched with a slight smile as Rigel began to separate some of the parts.
“These are the parts for the main taser, I think.” He picked up one of three metal discs and turned it over, a frown creasing his brow. “Huh. I can’t be sure without taking it apart, but there’s a charge in here, too, right?” At Severus’s nod, Rigel’s eyes brightened. “And these appendages look like they’re meant to latch onto something. It’s a projectile, isn’t it? I can tell that these bits over here are the launcher,” he said, pulling those parts aside as well.
“They’re called Taser Discs,” Severus said. “I’ll show you how to disassemble one later.”
“This is a grapple wire,” Rigel said, setting that aside next, and scanning the parts again. “And these look kind of like the parts for my web shooter, so most likely the grapple launcher.”
Rigel went for the baton parts next, and Severus bit back a grin at the kid’s expression. “Oooh, telescoping yantok? so cool,” he mumbled under his breath. Severus watched Rigel investigate the spring mechanism and electrical charge, even as the back of his mind noted the term Rigel had used. Rigel was pretty clearly of Pacific Islander descent, but calling the batons yantok suggested that he was Filipino specifically. Severus added it to his mental file of “Things About Rigel”. He had promised not to actively look into Rigel’s identity—though he suspected that Rigel’s name was at least partially false—and he wasn’t willing to lose the kid’s tenuous trust by breaking that promise.
But that didn’t mean that Severus wasn’t paying attention, or that he wouldn’t be prepared for when Rigel was finally ready to let him in.
Rigel had sorted most of the parts out, but he lingered over a thin, coiled cord, fingertips just brushing the wire. “I’m not sure what this is,” he admitted.
“It’s a garrotte.” Severus watched Rigel’s fingers jump back as though burned.
“Oh,” the kid said in a small voice. His expression had gone blank. There was a tightness in Severus’s stomach, but with the ease of long practice he ignored it. For a moment, he considered pointing out that a garrotte might only be used to the point of unconsciousness—but that would be a lie of omission, and a disservice to the young hero.
“You know that the Avengers kill people,” he said, trying to be gentle. “I’ve killed a lot of people, and I’m indirectly responsible for the deaths of many more.” Rigel’s eyes—gray and shadowed and older than they should be—seemed to pierce through Severus, and he felt compelled to say, “I’d like to say that we don’t have a choice. That as cruel as it is, sometimes casualties and collateral damage are unavoidable. But the truth is that sometimes we were just careless, and those deaths are on our shoulders as surely as if we held the gun ourselves.”
“That’s why you signed the Accords,” Rigel said softly.
“Yes,” he admitted. “Though I’m not certain the Accords were right, either. Maybe if we’d had a say in them from the beginning, before people got angry, and before they became a weapon in the hands of politicians.”
“Is that why Black Widow turned on us at the airport?” Rigel asked, and stole all the breath from Severus’s lungs. He could feel Rigel’s eyes on him—determined, unrelenting.
“I don’t know,” he said, unable to keep his voice level. “I don’t know why Lily did what she did.” But he thought about the smiles she and James—she and Potter—had shared, the quiet jokes and lingering glances and mission after mission as a team of two, and he thought he knew at least partly why.
“You told me back then that Captain Potter was wrong, but he wasn’t a villain. But he broke international law and he fought you and he went with the Winter Soldier,” Rigel said, voice trembling. “Why? Why did he do it?”
“Sirius Black was his friend,” Severus said, in a voice that didn’t feel like his own. (he killed my parents, James—he killed my grandfather!) “And he was brainwashed.” (he’s my friend) “And I suppose Cap didn’t trust me enough, in the end.” (so was I)
Rigel was silent for a long time, and Severus took the chance to get his breathing back under control.
“Sometimes families do shitty things to each other,” Rigel said, voice far away. Severus looked at him and thought oh, I’d bet on it. (were we really a family, though?) But then Rigel’s eyes refocused and his gaze fell on the widow’s bite spread out before them. “But you’re still fixing their tech.”
Severus couldn’t argue, because Rigel was right and they both knew it. An exercise for Rigel or not, there was no denying that on a lab table behind him there were Hawkeyes’ arrows and Captain America’s utility belt and even Scarlet Witch’s gloves.
Rigel smiled sadly. “I guess that you can still love someone even if you don’t like them very much.”
or where there’s just too much hurt to trust them anymore, even if you can’t give up on them yet.
Severus found his voice again. “We all made mistakes,” he admitted. “I can’t change what happened, but I can do my best to fix my own.” He grimaced, thinking about the Secretary of State’s upcoming legislation, and the amount of political maneuvering it would take to have it shot down. “Speaking of which, there’s a charity gala for the New York City Fire Department in two weeks. Saturday the 23rd. I’d like you to attend if you’re able.”
Rigel immediately brightened. Severus had taken him to a handful of events over the past year as his personal intern. He had a number of aims in mind: he wanted to expose Rigel to the world of politics and business, anticipating that the young superhero might one day play a role similar to his own, and to allow him to socialize and build connections with the young men and women who would become the pivotal players of the next generation—but he also knew that Rigel was extremely observant, and no source of information should be overlooked. Rigel was well aware of this reasoning, but had nevertheless begun to form genuine friendships with some of the teens he’d met.
“I’ll check, but I think I should be able to make it.”
“Good,” Severus said. “Now let’s take a look at one of these Taser Discs, and then we’ll see if you can figure out how to put the bite back together.” Rigel turned his attention to the work at hand, and Severus quickly fell back into teaching mode.
If their conversation about the Rogue Avengers continued to burn in the back of his mind, that was no one’s business but his own.
+++
“Ragnarok?” Dumbledore says to himself, holding the crown of the fire demon Surtur. “I’m glad I decided to travel sunwise rather than widdershins—imagine if I’d spent years away from home before finding this. I’d best return it to my father’s treasury, and seek his wisdom about the Mad Titan.”