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He almost breaks his neck tripping over a tree stump on his way down. Another explosion rocks the ground and he loses his footing. Pebbles tumble down the slope. Tony glances back. The plume of black smoke rising up above the juniper trees has doubled in size.

He gracelessly lowers himself down a particularly steep decline and his feet finally hit the cracked, dirt-packed soil of the valley he had spotted from above. His elbow is bleeding, his hip sore, his ribs protesting loudest of all.

It seems like a dried-up riverbed. Thank fuck it’s dried up and he doesn’t have to swim his way to safety.

He has always had a fear of drowning.

This was supposed to be in-and-out. Instead, he is stranded, with his suit on the fritz. He was well within the blast radius when the first explosion hit. The Zodiac base he had planned to infiltrate and search has now been reduced to a pile of ashes. He doesn’t even know who was behind the drone attack.

He very much doubts that it’s a coincidence: the bunker exploding in front of him right as he landed at the edge of the clearing. Someone knew he’d be here. Which is all sorts of messed up, because Tony didn’t even knew he’d be here. It was the usual rash decision, made this morning as he packed Morgan’s lunch box and wondered what to do with himself while she was off to school.

Fuck. Pepper will be out of her mind with worry when unable to contact him. She will turn to FRIDAY first. Oh, sure thing, ma’am. Boss flew out to Mexico, to a hidden base owned by a transnational criminal network. As he approached the base, a drone attack took place. I have since lost all contact. I have also updated the shopping list while you were at work, the crunchy peanut butter is on sale. Not good. Very not good.

He needs to get out of here.

He has hidden his suit near the top of the mountain, under prickly bramble-bushes. It was dead weight, and he couldn’t afford to carry it around. He has no food or water, no FRIDAY. He’s just a puny, mortal, fragile human, getting too old for this. He knows he isn’t too far away from civilization; Monterrey should only be ten miles to the northeast as the crow flies. Once there, he can probably borrow a phone or hitch himself a ride back to the border.  But the sun is relentless, his ribs feel bruised, and the landscape is treacherous: high limestone mountains on either side of the riverbed, running in parallel vertical lines like giant knife blades. If anyone from Zodiac is still alive, they will no doubt start swarming the area like angry bees, looking for the person responsible for the attack. Tony doesn’t want to be the one they find.

Which is why, when he hears low voices, footsteps grinding against pebbles, he shifts his stance into something defensive, ready to break into a sprint.

Until he recognizes the silhouette of the man appearing around the bend, head turned away.

“Come on, kid, keep moving!” Clint Barton calls over his shoulder and he turns back. His gaze lands on Tony and he freezes, his hand flying to his bow on instinct. Then, his shoulders sag. “Tony fucking Stark,” he says, and he points at the black smoke. “Did you blow up that base, you piece of shit?”

“Absolutely not. I almost got blown up with it.”

Clint is not alone. A few yards behind him, a scrawny figure halts and squints at Tony from underneath a frayed baseball cap. Sunken eyes. Hair tied back. Dressed in a black undershirt and cargo pants.

Can’t be older than eighteen.

“What are you doing here?” Clint asks. He looks how Tony remembers him. Maybe a bit more weather-beaten, a few more lines around the eyes.

“Following a lead.” He keeps it vague. It has been five years since he last saw Clint. After Ultron. Before Morgan. He always liked Clint: the man generally keeps to himself and doesn’t bother others with small talk. Tony also, for the same reason, never fully trusted Clint.

“In the middle of nowhere in Mexico, on the exact same day that I am here too. What are the odds.” Clint’s voice is deceptively casual. He clearly doesn’t fully trust Tony, either.

“What are you doing here?”

Clint jerks his head at the boy behind him. “SHIELD mission. Extracting a hostage.”

Tony glances back at the teenager, whose face has now morphed into something entirely impassive. “He seems thrilled about his rescue.”

“He’s a real pain in the ass, as teenagers always are,” Clint states bluntly, and with zero effort to avoid the kid hearing it. “Cut the crap, Stark. What’s going on here? Where’s your suit?”

“Had to leave it.” Tony plasters on a smile. “Care to give an old friend a ride?”

“I don’t believe a single fucking word out of your mouth,” Clint says. “But I want to get out of here. I have to meet our pilot by five PM, and I have a feeling we might have some angry people on our tail. You can come if you can keep up, capisce?”

It is rare that Tony has to depend on others to find a way out of a predicament. He doesn’t care for it much. “Capisco.”

They start following the dried-up riverbed as it winds around jagged rock outcrops. The teenager follows. He pulled his cap lower over his eyes and keeps a distance of several yards between himself and Clint at all times.

“How old is he?” Tony asks.

“Sixteen.”

“What’s the story?”

“Kidnapped by Zodiac, about two months ago. You think he’d be grateful to be out of there, but he’s done nothing but criticize.”

“You use a bow and arrow,” the teenager says, tersely. “There is no rational reason, but in terms of range and accuracy, to favor—"

“Yeah, okay,” Clint interrupts, waving a hand without looking back. “I’ve already heard the speech. Twice.”

“—six-inch spot at 60 yards at most—” the kid mutters.

“How is a single kidnapping a SHIELD-worthy case?” Tony asks. “What, is he the president’s son?”

Clint shrugs. “Close enough. Mom and dad are big fish in SHIELD, I believe. The order came all the way from the top: Secretary Ross. I just said yes because he’s a kid. Nepotism or no, I’ll always get kids out.”

“Fair enough.”

“Be honest, Stark. Did you blow that place up?”

“I didn’t. I swear to god, Barton. All I know is, it was a drone attack. FRIDAY saw them moving in just in time to save my ass from getting blown up, too.”

“Damn it,” Clint mutters. “This is all too much fucking coincidence for me. This whole mission doesn’t smell right. Why are you here?”

“Personal reasons.”

“Eat my shorts, Stark. Wandering around the middle of nowhere with your pretty rich haircut, no food or water, no AI to bail you out. I’m saving your ass here. And our survival might just depend on me understanding what the fuck is even going on. So give me something to work with.”

Tony grits his teeth. He probably does depend on Clint for survival. “I’m the one who told SHIELD about that Zodiac base in the first place,” he shares. “I found out some… stuff. Contacted Fury a few weeks ago. Fury told me he’d handle it, but I had my doubts.”

“That’s fucking classic,” Clint grounds out. “I can’t believe you handed SHIELD information about Zodiac and then went on to sabotage our mission.”

“I didn’t sabotage. I just drew my own plan. I didn’t know you’d be here today.”

“You’re so damn self-absorbed. Just utterly incapable of cooperating with anyone for anything.”

Tony blinks at him. “And your point is…?”

“Did you know about the kid?”

“No. Just knew there was something going on in there.”

“Something big enough for you to decide to fly all the way out here?”

Tony says nothing.

Clint gives him another glare, then glances over his shoulders and whistles sharply. “Hey. Kid. You know what Zodiac was up to at that base?”

“Yes,” the kid says. And nothing else.

“Well?” Clint prompts.

“Well, what?”

Clint huffs. “Share with the rest of the class. A day in the life of a Zodiac hostage.”

“Which day?”

“What do you mean ‘which day’? A typical fucking Tuesday.”

“I had eight Tuesdays. Which one?”

“Christ on a cracker…”

The boy looks frustrated, as if Clint is the idiot. “You asked.”

“You’re being deliberately obtuse. I just need to know the juicy stuff. Come on.”

“It’s classified.”

That has Clint abruptly standing still. “Excuse me?”

The kid gives him a cool look. “I don’t know your clearance level. If you don’t already know, it’s probably not high enough.”

“Excuse me?”

“We’re wasting time,” the kid says. He moves past them and continues down the narrow, steep-walled canyon. Clint gapes after him. Shakes his head. Starts walking again.

“What’s his name?” Tony asks.

“Peter.”

“And what’s our plan?”

“Follow the riverbed north about ten miles until we reach a fork in the river. That’s were my pilot is waiting.”

Peter grumbles something under his breath.

“Got something to say?” Clint enquires mildly.

Peter glares at them. That particular expression is already starting to become familiar. “We’re not going north,” he says. “We’re going northwest. If anything, we’re going west-northwest.”

“All right,” Clint says. “But the choice was southeast or northwest. So I figure we’re doing all right.”

“Oh, you figure.”

“Kid…”

“I just want to make sure, you know, because so far you haven’t really inspired confidence that you know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t care for your tone. But I’ll chalk it up to trauma,” Clint says. His voice is light, unbothered. Tony would already be picking the kid up by the scruff of his neck and shaking him if this were his mission, not matter how rich and influential his parents are. But whatever, it’s not Tony’s mission, not his problem. Very much not his problem. He has his own problems.

Walk for seven miles. Meet their pilot by five PM. Morgan will be out of school by then and Tony will not be there to pick her up. Miss Faust will call Pepper. Pepper will… not panic, not outwardly at least. For Morgan’s sake. Fuck, what will she say to Morgan?

“What’s the plan with the pilot?” he asks. “Where’s he dropping us off?”

“SHIELD base near Odessa, Texas.”

If the helicopter is reasonably fast, they’ll be there by sundown. Every minute he spends on this journey is a minute Pepper might presume him dead. Fuck. He hopes she won’t take RESCUE and fly out. She probably would in a heartbeat, if it weren’t for Morgan.

They march under the grey and silent cliffs. The canyon is not very deep, but grows more and more narrow as they continue on, until they can no longer walk side by side. The walls are smooth and almost upright. Above their heads, clumps of wildflowers grow from the seeps in the walls. There are no places to hide, nowhere to escape to if they get spotted.

They go in a single file, footsteps echoing in the stony hollows above. Peter behind, Clint ahead. Tony can see the tension in his shoulders as the man keeps craning his neck to look up.

When he glances back at Peter, the teenager seems similarly alert. He has turned his cap backwards for an unobstructed field of vision, and his eyes keeping darting up towards the cliffsides above them, left, right, up, down.

Clint pauses, lifts a tip of his shirt to wipe his brow. “We’re definitely heading north, now.”

Peter grumbles something under his breath.

“Got something to add?” Clint inquires, friendly.

This time, the only response is a glare.

Quite abruptly, the canyon widens again, opening up into something more like a valley. The rocky walls are more gently sloping here, matorral and grassy-floored. You could climb up the side and reach the top with just a bit of effort. They are still far too exposed to Tony’s liking. Anyone could see them coming from a mile away.

“What time is it?”

Clint glances down at his watch. “Seven minutes past three.”

One hour later in New York. School is out. Morgan is probably telling Miss Faust right about now that she doesn’t spot her daddy anywhere outside. Miss Faust will have her wait inside a bit longer before calling Pepper. Tension is gathering in his gut, his mind going fuck fuck fuck fuck like a broken record, and the stupid damn teenager choses that exact moment to say: “There’s people up ahead.”

Clint and Tony both stop dead. In the distance, the riverbed meanders around another corner. Tony scans the shrubbery at the top of the cliffside ahead. “What do you mean?” Next to him, Clint’s body is still.

“I hear them.”

Tony holds his breath for a stretching moment. Apart from birds and crickets, the silence is absolute. “I don’t hear anything. I don’t see anything.”

“Not here. Beyond the bend.”

“What, you got elephant ears or something? You’re being paranoid and we don’t have time for it.”

“We have time,” Peter snaps. “We got one hour and fifty-three minutes left to cover at most four miles. The average walking speed for a man your age is 2.8 miles per hour. Which means we’ll only need one hour and twenty-six minutes, giving us a leeway—”

“What’s wrong with you, are you a malfunctioning android?”

“Tony,” Clint warns.

“I don’t have time for his bullshit!”

“He’s a teenager who was abducted,” Clint grouses. "Take a fucking second and pull yourself together.”

Tony sets his jaw and paces onward. He can hear Clint speaking to Peter in undertones, through the staticky whine of panic in his own ears. “Tony,” Clint then says, his voice carrying. “When you get to the next bend, go slow.”

“Why don’t you two go slow,” Tony throws over his shoulder. “And I’ll get a fucking move on and catch that helicopter. Maybe wave at you as I take off.”

There are furious footsteps grinding against pebbles, and the next thing Tony knows Clint has grabbed his arm and shoved him up against a rock, a sharp crackle of fury in his eyes. “Say that again.”

Tony wheezes out a breath. His ribs twinge painfully. He slaps Clint’s hand away. “It was a damn joke, Barton, get a grip.”

“Was it? Because Tony Stark seems exactly the sort of person only out to save his own skin. Chop off the hands that feeds you and leave the other person to bleed to death.”

“Are you dense? We were a team. We fought together.”

“And I never trusted you to have my back.”

“I flew a nuke into a fucking wormhole for you.”

“You also created a robot that almost destroyed the world, and then peaced out, leaving us to deal with the aftermath.”

Tony pulled out because Pepper got pregnant. But. The thing is. He never told anyone, apart from Rhodey. “You had it handled.”

Clint gives him another little push, but then steps back. “Fuck you, Stark. You’re a selfish piece of shit. It’s probably because of you that this whole mission went south, and I’m still letting you hitch a ride. If you try to screw us over, I will put an arrow through your knee.”

Tony wants to retaliate. He has about a hundred witty insults ready to fire. He has always known how to talk people down. But he needs to get home. Morgan is sitting in the classroom while Miss Faust might already be dialing Pepper’s number. “Let’s just get a move on.”

“Walk ahead of me. And when you get to the next bend,” Clint says, pointing, “go. fucking. slow.” Across his shoulder, Tony catches sight of Peter watching them, his gaze coldly dispassionate, eyes simmering with something indefinable.

This whole thing is starting to give him the creeps. He doesn’t know what mission Clint got himself into, but whatever, that kid is not his problem. He’s got his own kid to worry about.

He walks on. And when he gets to the next bend, he goes effing slow, letting Clint pass him. Peter hangs back. Clint crouches behind a rock. Cranes his neck, ducks back down. “Fuck. Kid was right.” He slips his backpack off, grabs his bow.

Tony sneaks a glance, too.

Up ahead, on a moss-tipped plateau between cliffs and crags, stand two people next to a jeep. Both have guns holstered to their hip. One has binoculars, but is turned away from them. Tony watches them with a slowly sinking pit in his stomach. They don’t look like casual tourists on a lovely hike.

“We should climb up the side, try to move through the shelter of the forest for a bit,” he suggests.

Clint shakes his head. “If that were possible, we would have done it from the go. It’s inaccessible up there. We run the risk of losing sight of the valley and missing our meeting point.”

“What’s your plan B, then?”

“My plan A,” Clint says, “is to kill them. Any objections?” He is already pulling out two arrows, so it doesn’t seem like he’d actually be open to objections.

“You better get them both at once,” Peter says. “Because if one manages to radio in, our gig is up.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Clint murmurs. He nocks both arrows on the string, one above the other.

“Are you taking the wind into account? Canyons have strong and gusty winds as a result of both mechanical and thermal turbulence, affecting up to twelve degrees of—”

“Kid. Shush.” Clint angles his bow ever so slightly. Breathes out slowly. Releases.

At the top of the cliffside, two bodies drop to the ground.

Clint jumps up and shoots forward, crossing the riverbed and quickly scaling the slope on the opposite side. Tony follows, but he is not as fast. He is only half-way up when there is the resounding BANG of a gunshot from above. He slips, knees grinding down against rocks, heart slamming into overdrive. There is a shuffling noise above him. A shout. Tony is unarmed. He should be running, hiding, but he scrambles to his feet and charges forward until he sees—

The two men are dead, definitely. But one of them now has a second arrow poking out of him and his gun in his hand.

Clint is flat on his back, his breathing shallow. Tony rushes to his side. The bullet grazed Clint’s leg just below the knee. The injury doesn’t look too bad, but Clint’s head lolls to one side and Tony spots a trickle of blood seeping onto the gravelly soil. He must have hit his head on a rock as he fell back. Tony taps him roughly on the cheek. “Clint. Hey. Barton!”

Clint groans, face twitching.

“Barton. Come on. No time for this.”

No response. Tony curses. This man is not going to get up and walk any time soon. Tony can’t carry him for four miles, and the scrawny teenager definitely can’t.  

….Not his mission, not his problem?

I’ll get a fucking move on and catch that helicopter. Maybe wave at you as I take off.

It had been a joke. But Clint won’t make it to the rendez-vous point. What’s the point in both of them being left behind here? Tony needs to get home. He needs— If Clint knew, he’d understand.

He notices only now that Peter has made the climb up, too. He is standing half-way between the two dead bodies and Clint, as if he wants nothing to do with either. Tony snaps out of his train of thought, shakes some sense into himself. “Get over here and help me.”

Peter doesn’t step closer. His fingers twitch at his sides. There is something about the way he looks at Clint, then at Tony, then at the car. As if he is considering his options.

“Help me,” Tony snaps. “Grab his legs. We need to move him into the shade.”

The boy sets his jaw and steps closer. “I can carry him by myself.”

“Don’t be stupid. Just grab his legs!”

Peter ignores him. He bends down and scoops Clint up in his arms like the built-like-a-brick-shithouse-archer weighs nothing. Tony stares as Peter stumbles down the rock covered slope and sets Clint down in the shade of a rocky overhang, then turns and starts climbing back up, going straight towards the car. There is a spark of determination in his eyes that sets Tony on edge.

He steps in the kid’s way and grabs him by the shoulder. “Don’t you dare take off.”

“Why do you even care?” Peter snaps, shrugging his hand off. “This is not your mission. And I’m not taking off. I’m covering tracks. You want their buddies to find them and realize we passed through here?” He moves to the back of the car, bends his knees, and lifts the entire rear bumper like it’s nothing. He pushes the car forward, wheelbarrow-style, towards the cliff edge, over the cliff edge.

It crashes down on sharp rocks below. An avalanche of splintered stones rains down onto it.

Peter grabs the nearest body and drags it away by the leg. The man soon disappears over the edge, too. And then his partner. Peter doesn’t even flinch as he watches their bodies tumble down the cliffside. He turns. His eyes meet Tony’s.

“You’re enhanced,” Tony says.

Peter walks back and picks up the gun. Clicks the safety on. Tucks it against the small of his back. “Let’s go,” he says. “I’ll carry him.”

-

It had all happened less than two weeks ago. Tony and FRIDAY were in the workshop, merrily hacking their way through government servers, as you do on a lazy Sunday, when FRIDAY alerted him to some partially coded files, buried deep, deep, deep within the servers, with Tony’s personal data in them.

So Tony grabbed a shovel and dug.

The files were encrypted beyond belief. Even FRIDAY was unable to decode most of them. But she decoded enough to uncover some very appalling truths.

SHIELD had a sample of Tony’s DNA. They called the sample ‘asset 14q07’, and they had planned to use it to run genetic experiments. Until they couldn’t. Because even more concerning, if such a thing were possible, was that the file stated that 14q07 had been stolen a few months ago by Zodiac, a criminal network operating out of the USA and Mexico.

But that day, just that morning, SHIELD had discovered where exactly Zodiac were hiding the DNA sample: in a base near Monterrey, Mexico.

Someone in the chain of command had messed up in their report of that discovery, because it was not as encrypted as it probably should have been, and that’s what had led FRIDAY to find it in the first place.

Tony called Fury. He didn’t necessarily want to. If SHIELD was messing around with his DNA, then the director of SHIELD didn’t exactly make his list of most trusted allies at the moment. But he had a family now, a responsibility that was bigger than just the greater good, and he had promised Pepper long ago not to fly out solo to go on insane missions, half-cocked. He wasn’t an Avenger anymore.

(If he had ever been one at all.)

So he decided to give Fury a chance; to allow for the possibility that Fury was unaware of some nefarious branch operating within his organization.

Fury didn’t inspire much confidence, though. He just grunted “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” and made clipped promises about looking into it.

And then Tony had to go upstairs because Morgan was shouting about wanting to go for a swim. He had found her already in her swimsuit, a towel slung over her shoulder and one hand on her hip. “Nu-uh,” he said. “I’m working today.”

“I’ll go swim alone.”

“You know very well you’re not allowed in the water unsupervised.”

“I can swim,” she said. “I can swim all the way around the lake. I’m a good swimmer.” Pepper has been teaching her for years. She is a pretty good swimmer.

For a four-year-old.

Morgan was unplanned. In fact, Pepper found out she was pregnant two weeks after she and Tony had broken up and she had quit her job at his company.

Pepper said she wanted to keep it, Tony said he wanted to be involved, they went to ultrasounds and baby care classes, and somewhere along the way, they forgot that they were supposed to be broken up. And then they kept forgetting. And then they bought the lake house together, and moved in, and had the baby, and raised her for four years and counting, and…

Tony really ought to get back to her about their relationship status.

“I’ll give you some chocolate and you can watch TV,” he said. A cheap trick, but no one had ever accused Tony of stellar and sophisticated parenting. “Or some grapes,” he added, lamely. “Or some slices of cucumber.”

Morgan gave him a face like he had suggested eating cow dung. “No cucumber!” Getting Morgan to eat vegetables was absolute torture.

The next few days, Tony tried not to think about his DNA sitting on a shelf in some Zodiac bunker.

He failed.

How did SHIELD get his DNA? What did Zodiac want with it? When he called Fury again, the man just said he was ‘looking into it’. His voice was more solemn that time, more resolute. “It’s serious,” he had said. “We’re taking it seriously, Stark.” It wasn’t enough to put Tony’s mind at ease.

Before he knew it, he had dusted off the suit he hadn’t used in almost five years and was flying out to Mexico.

-

“Kid,” Tony says. “I need a break. Sorry.” His ribs are fine, but the hip that was only slightly sore an hour ago, is now screaming with every step.

Peter sets Clint down. The man has faded in and out of consciousness for the past half hour, attempted and failed to say something a few times, and is currently out cold. All signs point to a serious head injury that requires medical attention.

Peter is… a damn enigma. There is no display of any emotion on his face. There is some in his body language, though, as he slowly backs away from Clint like one would from an enraged bull that might attack at any moment. “Eight percent of head injuries result in death or a persistent vegetative state,” Peter says matter-of-factly, without looking away from Clint.

“Ah,” Tony says, slumping to the ground next to Clint.

A teenager. Enhanced. Who handles guns and dead bodies in a way that gives off the distinct impression he’s done this before. Many, many times.

“So,” Tony says. “I feel like we, ah, kinda rushed our introductions back there. How about a few ‘get to know me’-questions to break the ice?”

Peter’s hands clench and unclench at his sides, his eyes still on Clint. “You’re not SHIELD,” he says, as if he’s reminding himself.

“I’m not. I’m just a guy trying to figure out if you need help or protection.” Wrong choice of words, he realizes immediately when Peter’s expression goes hard and hostile. “Just… Clint said you’re the son of some big fancy SHIELD boss. But you don’t seem all that excited to be going home. And you’re enhanced. And you really looked as if you were thinking about stealing the car and taking off back there.”

Peter’s eyes drift to him. “I was thinking about taking off,” he says. “Still thinking about it, in fact. Who is going to stop me? You’re old and unarmed, he’s old and injured. I know there’s nothing but Mexican desert around for a hundred miles, but I can go for that helicopter. I haven’t flown one of those things before, but I have a gun. I can be persuasive.”

Interesting. The kid doesn’t know how close they are, in fact, to civilization. Maybe he would have escaped his captors weeks ago if he had known. Unless… “Were you even abducted? Or are you part of Zodiac?” Is Clint the abductor, here?

“I’m not. Zodiac captured me in Cincinnati fifty-nine days ago.”

“So. Don’t you want to go home?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Why not?”

Peter says nothing.

“All right, you wanted to steal that car. And then, what? Try to make it across the border without any papers?”

“Or not make it across the border. I think I can make it work. My Spanish has gotten decent. Getting pistol-whipped every time you don’t understand an order is a great motivation.” He rolls his shoulders back, stares Tony down. “So, no, I don’t need your help or protection,” he says. “You need mine. I could leave you behind with this SHIELD agent, and there’s nothing you could do to stop me. See if you manage to drag him out of this death-trap canyon and across the death-trap desert.”

“What’s stopping you from leaving, then?”

“Just that it might be more merciful if I snap both your necks before I leave. I haven’t decided yet.” He says it calmly.

“Understood,” Tony says.

“Since you’ll die either way, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” His first guess is that Peter is not, in fact, the son of some SHIELD exec. A little white lie from management to get Clint to actually agree to deliver a child soldier to their doorstep. He needs to get on top of this situation, fast. Understand what exactly is happening here. It’s likely his only chance to save himself, save Clint. And perhaps, save this kid who doesn’t want help or protection.

He is painfully aware that Peter has the upper hand in many ways. Young, strong, armed. But Tony has always used words to talk people down. “So. Not a fan of SHIELD, huh? What have you heard about them?”

“You don’t understand anything,” Peter snaps. He kneels and starts untying the laces of his right boot with sharp motions.

“Okay. Forget it,” Tony says, and tries a different angle. “Listen. The reason I even ended up here is because I found out a few weeks ago that some renegade branch within SHIELD stole my DNA. They called it ‘asset 14q07’. I don’t know what they used it for, but I do know it ended up in the hands of Zodiac a few months ago. Since you are also somehow connected to SHIELD and ended up with Zodiac a few months ago, I’m guessing you were there when they stole it, or traded it, or whatever happened. Maybe you were even the one who stole it. No hard feelings. I just want to know.”

Something about his words piqued Peter’s interest. He is carefully, warily assessing Tony. “Your DNA.”

“Yup. Stolen by a bunch of geneticists.”

“Huh,” Peter says. He pulls the laces taut and ties them again.

“I can tell you have some beans. If you’re going to snap my neck anyways, you may as well spill ‘em.”

Peter stands, tugs at his cap. “I am asset 14q07,” he says. “I was born out of a test tube. I served SHIELD for sixteen years. And now I think I might expand my horizons a bit.” He says it easily. He tilts his head, glancing at the valley ahead.

Tony jerks back so violently that he bangs his head against the rock behind him. “Fuck. Ouch. You—huh?” he says, thoughts stuttering to a stop like gears in a machine getting blocked. He repeats the words in his head, repeats them again, cautious suspicion morphing into shocked disgust.

“I would like to continue walking now. I made my decision. I am not carrying that agent anymore. I have no particular grudge against you, Tony Stark. You can walk with me if you can keep up, and I’ll see if I can fly us both to a town somewhere where we’ll go our separate ways. Or you can stay with your friend and wait to die with him.”

Tony is too busy reeling in ice cold horror to react. “Are you saying…” he starts. His bewilderment must be all over his face, because Peter’s mouth flattens, almost condescendingly.

Peter turns and grabs the backpack he had dropped next to Clint. Clint makes a noise of protest, the hand he had loosely curled around one of the straps sliding away. His eyes are half-lidded. Peter ignores him entirely. He hoists the backpack onto his back. Tugs at the straps. Turns his back on them both. Starts walking.

Tony estimates he has about ten seconds to get on top of whatever the HELL this situation is. “Wait,” he says, pushing himself up, stepping away from Clint. And then louder, “wait! Kid, just— Just hang on.”

Peter keeps walking.

Tony breaks into a jog to catch up. “Peter. Stop.” He tugs at the boy’s shirt.

Peter snatches his arm back with a glare. “I said you could walk with me,” he says. “But if you slow me down, I will shoot you.”

“He doesn’t deserve to die,” Tony says, walking with him but not attempting to hold him back. “He came here to save your life.”

“No, he didn’t. He came with SHIELD orders to extract me, and they made the mistake of thinking I would come willingly.”

“He didn’t know. He thought you were just some kid he was rescuing.”

“That’s what he told you.”

Clint is still sitting there, slumped against the rocks, watching them leave. It’s giving Tony an almost sick feeling. “There’s no way in hell he knows about this. No way in hell. I trust him enough to know that.”

“Do you trust whoever gave him his orders?”

“I don’t,” Tony says. “Fuck them. This is about Clint. He has kids, you know.”

Peter gives him a look that is almost puzzled. Like he has never heard anyone use that as an argument for anything. He doesn’t slow down.

“Help me get him out of here. We won’t turn you over to SHIELD. We’ll… I’ll take you anywhere you want, kid. We’ll…” protect you won’t go over well, he learned that. “We can partner up. If what you’re saying is true, Clint will be on your side.”

“I don’t need partners,” Peter says. “Do you want to get home or not? There’s no rational reason for me to help him. There’s nothing in it for me. There’s nothing in it for you either.”

“No there isn’t,” Tony acknowledges. “It’s just about doing some good.”

Peter scoffs.

“Do you want money? I can get you money. In unmarked bills, in offshore accounts. Whatever you need. All you have to do is drop us off wherever we can get to a hospital. That’s it.”

Peter pauses. Finally.

“Please.”

Peter takes off the backpack and tosses it at Tony with enough force to make him stumble back. “That means you carry this.” He turns on his heel and walks back towards Clint.

-

It’s 4:51 PM when they catch sight of the helicopter, standing in the middle of the riverbed. This part of the valley is wide; the river would have been lazy, broad and shallow.

The pilot is slouched over strangely in the seat.

“He’s dead,” Peter says, lowering Clint to the ground and staying crouched down as he surveys the area.

Tony takes a step back. “Are you sure?”

There is a rustle to their left. Peter snatches out his gun with lightning-fast reflexes.

Natasha Romanoff steps away from the shadows of the trees. Her hair is dyed pitch black and she has sunglasses. The look of a woman who expects to be needing a disguise. “Tony fucking Stark,” she says. “And here I thought I was gonna be the surprise appearance.”

Chapter Text

“Don’t shoot, kid,” Tony says.

“Is she SHIELD?” Peter grouses.

“Are you?” Tony asks.

“Not today,” she says. “Can I have a look at Clint?” Her eye contact is with Peter. Her posture is relaxed, unthreatening.

Peter takes two steps back. He lowers the gun but keeps his finger on the trigger, watching her like a hawk.

Natasha kneels at Clint’s side. Feels his pulse. Pulls his eyelids up. “What happened?”

Tony squats next to her. “Bullet grazed his leg. I think he hit his head on a rock as he fell.”

She feels around his headwound with light fingertips. “Did he lose a lot of blood?”

“Some, but not dangerously so, I’d say.”

“What are you doing here, Stark?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“Fury sent me.”

“Clint didn’t seem to know anything about that.”

“Fury didn’t send him. Secretary Ross did. What are you doing here, Stark?”

“If Fury sent you, you know how I’m involved.”

She gives him an icy stare. “You were involved in plenty of things of the last years. Doesn’t mean you ever actually showed up.”

Sheesh, it seems his decision to abruptly retire and drop off the face of the planet five years ago led to resentment all around. “How much do you know?”

“How much do you know?”

“Hey,” Peter snaps. He has lifted the gun again. The barrel is pointing at Natasha. “Can you fly a helicopter?”

“Yes.”

“Then the chit-chat is over and we’re leaving.”

“I would like to first explain—”

Peter clicks off the safety. “Want to change your mind?”

“Yes, I think I do,” she says, and pulls Clint up by the shoulders.

Tony helps heave Clint into the back and clumsies around with an icepack. Natasha drags the pilot out of his seat and takes his place.

Peter gets in the front. He studies the screen on the dashboard for a moment. “We’re going north-east,” he says. The gun is resting horizontally on his thigh, the barrel still aimed at Natasha’s side.

“Seat belt?” she suggests pleasantly. “Headset?” She flicks two switches in one motion and the blades start turning. She checks the circuit breaker, then the compass. The kid doesn’t know it yet, but even though he’s the one with the gun, Natasha is the one with the power.

“Peter, right?” she says.

No response.

“I’m Natasha.”

No response.

“I know you grew up in a SHIELD facility for the Bio-Tech Force Enhancement Project since you were five. The people operating this facility are in fact part of an illicit branch within SHIELD. We uncovered its existence over the past two weeks. Do you know the name Nick Fury?”

That gets a response. Peter jerks in his seat, finger almost sliding off the trigger of his gun.

“He didn’t know about you, Peter. He is the real SHIELD. When we found out Ross had sent Clint out to extract you, Fury sent me after him to intercept you both. Off the record.”

Tony can’t help but interrupt. “All Fury has to do is shut that shit down. He’s the director!”

“It’s not that simple,” she says with cool impatience. “We found out this branch is being bankrolled by Secretary Ross. He is the one who assigned Clint the mission. Fury needs to figure out exactly how deep this rabbit hole goes, who in his own organization he can trust. That’s his chess game to play, and it’s a risky one. My only mission is to get the kid to safety. Peter,” she glances sideways at him. “I can protect you.”

Ouch. She used the p-word. Peter’s face twists. “How much do you know about me?” he asks.

“Everything that has been written down.”

“Tell me what makes you think I need protection.”

“There are men after you. Highly trained men. I will keep you off their radar and take out anyone who stands in my way. Our flight path across the border is still clear, but it won’t be when Ross realizes his mission has been compromised. He can most likely track this helicopter. But I have a safe location for you. Can you afford to lose me as your ally?”

Peter looks at her for a stretching moment. He leans forward a little so he can tuck the gun against his back. He takes off his cap. Unties and reties his hair. Puts the cap back on. “What’s our plan?” he asks.

-

They take off, ascending vertically, leaving behind juniper trees, dust and spikes of rock. Tony sits in the back, stabilizing Clint’s neck and holding the ice pack in place, letting Natasha carry them away from the canyon of death.

-

The sun drops steadily towards the horizon.

It is a three-hour flight to Natasha’s chosen location in Texas, right next to a freeway, where they will cross straight through a patch of forest, jump onto a freight train and hop off in some medium-sized town with a motel. Whoever at SHIELD is tracking the helicopter will hopefully think they hitched a ride by car instead.

“What about Clint?” Tony asks when she explains the plan.

“I can properly assess his situation at the motel. If we can at all avoid it, we leave hospitals out of it.”

“Can’t we drop him off as a John Doe? Maybe I bribe a few doctors?”

“Stark, he’s Hawkeye,” Natasha responds icily. “Some nurse will post something on Instagram about it. SHIELD will know where he is within a few hours.”

Peter spends the entire flight sitting half-turned in the front seat. He is watching Tony, then Clint, then Natasha, then the screen on the dashboard, then repeats it again and again, in that order, methodical, measured, calculating.

14q07.

“So what are you, a mutate?” Tony asks.

Peter is currently watching the dashboard and doesn’t answer.

“Romanoff, what is he?”

“Sixteen,” she snaps, and Tony doesn’t ask further.

Pepper must be… Tony has no idea what she must be doing. He doesn’t know what he would do, if Pepper was the one who disappeared on an impromptu mission while he was left alone with a young child who would have questions, and you don’t want to worry her but you don’t have answers either, and you can’t jump into action and just go find your spouse because your daughter needs at least one rational, responsible person in her life.

He would resent her for putting him in that position, that’s a definite fact.

He’ll be able to sneak out and find a phone at the motel.

Peter’s eyes dart from Natasha back to Clint, breaking his pattern. Clint’s hand twitches where it rests on leg.

“Sit rep?” Clint mutters.

Tony jolts. The icepack he had been holding against Clint’s head slides down. Clint’s eyes are half-lidded. Some color has returned to his face.

“Try to stay awake,” Natasha calls out.

“Tash?”

“It will be extremely helpful,” she continues, “if you can walk.”

Clint hums softly. “This life of death?”

“Possibly.”

“Then I guessss—I can walk.” The way he slurs the words together doesn’t inspire much confidence.

“Hand me his backpack,” Peter says.

Tony frowns at him as he presses the icepack back against Clint’s head. “What for?”

Peter gives him a frosty look. One that Tony translates as did you forget I have the gun, bozo? or perhaps the additional did you forget how much you are of no use to me, bozo?

“Kid OK?” Clint mumbles.

“A lot better than you.” Tony drags the backpack closer with one foot until Peter can reach one of the straps. The teen drags it into his lap and begins to look through it, his mouth set in a grim line. Tony assumes he is looking for food or water, but Peter instead digs up a pencil stub and the manual for the first aid kit.

Tony catches Natasha glancing sideways. Okay. She thinks it’s weird, too.

Peter begins to scribble. Stops. “Does anyone have a knife?”

Silence meets that question.

“To sharpen the pencil,” Peter clarifies.

“I think you can make do,” Natasha says curtly.

Peter’s mouth twists, but he doesn’t press the issue.

-

They touch down in a field by the freeway. A clutter of nervous cows stand in a corner, watching them. Evening has set in clear and cool.

Clint’s condition has improved marginally but steadily. He complains about one hell of a headache, but his speech is less slurred. Natasha hauls him out of the backseat, slinging his arm around her shoulder. “A train will pass by at slow speed in twelve minutes,” she says. “Point three miles that way. Let’s move.” Tony takes Clint’s other arm. Peter tucks the first aid manual into his pocket and takes both Clint’s backpack and Natasha’s. He hangs back, expression wary; lets them go in front.

They stumble across rough ground, sinking up to their ankles into a muddy layer of decomposing leaves.

The forest ends quite abruptly where it meets the railroad tracks. There are cornfields on the other side. They set Clint down against a tree.

“There’s food and water in my bag,” Natasha tells Peter.

“Yeah, I figured.”

“We have a few minutes.”

Sitting still feels wrong, with the very traceable, very noticeable helicopter sitting less than a mile away from them.

“Peter,” Natasha says. “There is a safehouse in Ohio. It’s not SHIELD. Only Fury and I know about it. I want to take you there.”

“Okay,” Peter says neutrally, and rips open a protein bar.

“No one will find you there.”

“Yeah. Good.”

Natasha studies him for a moment, lips pursed. Her eyes flick to Tony, then Clint, then towards the spot on the horizon where the railroad disappears around a corner. Her face has never been particularly easy to read, but Tony can take a wild guess about her current thought process. When she went on this mission, she hadn’t expected to also get stuck with one badly injured teammate and one former teammate who isn’t worth much more than dead weight.

-

“Can you just—” Clint says. “Sorry, Nat. Brain like fucking quicksand right now. Can you explain it again? Where we’re going?”

They are crouching between construction materials. The train clatters along the tracks at a leisurely pace. Natasha binds Clint’s headwound with a bandage. “We’ll lay low for the night. A motel in Chico, Texas.”

“When do we get to Chico, Texas?”

“I’ll get my map out in a moment.”

“At this speed, around thirty-five minutes,” Peter says. He sits by the open door of the boxcar, his face turned to the wind. The first aid manual sticks out of his pocket. Clint’s backpack rests against his side. “Tracks lead on to Bowie, Stoneburg, Ringgold...”

“Been paying attention?” Natasha asks lightly. She looks calmer now that they made it on board. It strikes Tony as unfair since he feels entirely out of his depth. He doesn’t know where they landed, doesn’t know in what direction they are currently traveling and has never heard of Chico. And there is a teenage freak of nature who has Tony’s DNA mixed into his own, and no one is fucking telling him anything. Natasha clearly doesn’t trust him any more than Clint does.

Thirty-five minutes until he can find a phone and call home.

“Were those your damn drones?” Clint mutters.

Natasha makes an affirming noise.

Tony braces his arm against a steel pipe to push himself up, looking at her with incredulity. “You blew up that base?”

“We needed SHIELD to think the mission simply went bust. With the whole base exploded and the helicopter missing, it will be difficult for them to figure out what the hell happened, who is where.”

“You almost blew me up with it!”

“You weren’t supposed to be there,” she snaps. “And we all know you’re not planning on sticking with us, either way. So you’ll excuse my lack of sympathy.”

Tony hadn’t actually thought past the phone call home, the phone call that has been the only goal on his mind since the Zodiac base exploded in his face. Damn it, it’s true. He doesn’t need to stick with these people. It’s not him SHIELD is after. SHIELD doesn’t even know he flew out to Mexico.

He looks back to Peter. The kid has taken out the first aid manual and is scribbling again.

Tony could just go home. Hack some more files. Learn about the ins and outs of 14q07 from the safety of his own kitchen, with Morgan in his lap. Bully Fury over the phone until he caves and tells all.

“I’m sure I’ll be missed,” he says.

Natasha says nothing.

The train cart jostles back and forth on a rough set of tracks. Tony rolls onto hands and knees and inches closer to Peter. “What are you writing?”

Peter stuffs the manual into his pocket. Draws up one knee. Says nothing.

Tony leans one shoulder against the steel, corrugated wall panels and studies his face. Peter looks tired, he thinks. There is nothing of the sharp alertness, the hyper-vigilance he saw earlier today. “So. How about that typical day as a Zodiac hostage.”

They pass a crossing. The headlights of a waiting car flash by. Peter squints against the light, then keeps squinting as he looks at Tony. “Which day.”

“I don’t know. The fifteenth.”

“Of which month?”

“This one.”

Peter shifts against the heavy sliding door, crosses his arms. “I woke up at a quarter to six. They gave me bread and eggs. Isa brought me to the assembly shop. We worked with the CNC machines. Andre was sick that day, I didn’t see him. We had soup at ten minutes past one. After lunch I worked in goods receiving. There was a whole truck of unmarked crates. Manny told me not to look inside. He left. I looked inside. There were a lot of bottles. With some gas, I suspect. I finished early. Isa took me back to my room. I ate rice. I read in my book. I went to sleep.”

“Huh,” Tony says, and wonders whether the kid just made all that up. It’s hard to tell.

Peter looks away from him. “The fourteenth was a lot more interesting. But you didn’t ask.”

-

They wait behind a wooden fence while Natasha checks them into the Rolling Meadows Inn in Chico. There aren’t any meadows around, let alone rolling ones.

Natasha gets them one room with two bunk beds. Poorly-lit. Sandpaper-rough towels. Water stains on the ceiling. The ground trembles when another freight train jangles by on the nearby tracks.

“Fury really splurged on this mission, didn’t he?” Tony comments, lingering just inside the doorway.

Peter has already claimed a top bunk, rolled against the far wall until he’s barely visible. Tony can see his eyes gleam under the dim lights. Natasha has set Clint down, back against the wall, and starts walking him through some sort of twelve-step thing to establish exactly how close to death he is.

“I’m going for a walk,” Tony says. No one acknowledges him.

He is itching to get his hands on a phone, but doesn’t ask the desk clerk. If she recognizes him, calls some friends or the press, the place will be swarming in no time. Probably not what Natasha had in mind when she said they’d be ‘laying low’. And—sure. Not his mission, not his problem. But drawing his own plan is a far cry from actively sabotaging the others.

He sprints down a deserted street where lawns are brown and patchy, with the erratic light of a television behind every curtain. It feels like a neighborhood on the brink of extinction. He spots a man standing on a corner under a streetlight, watching his dog take a shit under someone else’s rosebush.

He approaches as calmly as he can muster, flashes a smile, politely asks to borrow the man’s phone. “Mine died, and I really need to call my wife.”

The man eyes him with some suspicion and no simmer of recognition. “Yeah, all right,” he says gruffly and digs his phone out.

Tony realizes the flaw in his plan a bit late, as he dials Pepper’s cell phone number from memory: He doesn’t want to freak Pepper out further, but he can’t explain things in detail without completely weirding out this random stranger.

“Hello?” Pepper says. Cautious, in the way you would be when your husband is missing and you get a call from an unknown number.

“Hi, honey,” Tony says, keeping his voice casual as he glances at the dog-walker from the corner of his eye. “I’m so sorry, my phone died, I had no way to call you.”

“Tony, Jesus…” she breathes. “Where— Are you safe?”

“Perfectly,” Tony says, chipperly. “I’m in Chico, Texas at the moment. How’s Morgan doing?”

“You piece of shit,” she growls. “I can’t believe you did this. Where, where are you exactly? I can come pick you up.”

“I’m okay, Pep. It’s late. I got a motel for the night. I’ll call you again first thing in the morning, we’ll see how to get me home.”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“Of course.”

“I will absolutely murder you if you don’t,” she says. “What were you doing in Mexico? Rhodey flew all the way out there, you know. Found a collapsed building with SHIELD agents swarming all over it. They didn’t seem to know anything either.”

Tony grinds his teeth, eyes again flicking up at the man standing in front of him. “Listen. I borrowed someone’s phone, I can’t talk for long. But that company you just mentioned is, uh, a no-go right now. Tell—Tell James to stay away from them.”

“SHIELD?”

“Is Morgan okay?”

“Sleeping. Fine. I didn’t tell her anything. Are you sure you’re safe?”

“I’m sure. Have to go now, honey. I promise I’ll call in the morning. I promise.”

-

Clint is sleeping when he gets back. “He’ll be fine,” Natasha says. “The ice packs reduced a lot of the swelling. Just needs lots of rest.”

“Swell,” Tony says. There are cans of food and protein bars neatly lined up on the floor between the bunk beds. Tony ignores them and grabs a ten-dollar bag of peanut M&Ms from the mini fridge instead, pouring them into his mouth all at once.

Peter appears in the doorway between bedroom and bathroom. His hair is no longer tied back, but hangs down limply. “I need a knife,” he says.

“Why do you need a knife? Again?”

Peter blows a strand of hair away from his face, irritated. “To cut this shit off!”

“And come out looking like a badly mowed lawn?” Tony says. “There’s probably scissors in the first aid kit. I’ll help you.”

He is surprised when Peter doesn’t protest. The scissors in the first aid kit are small, but they’ll do. When Tony steps into the bathroom, Peter is already perched on the edge of the bathtub, a towel slung around his shoulders. He is holding his body very still. He looks up at Tony, gaze steady and sharp.

“Crew cut?”

“Just short.”

Tony has cut Pepper’s hair a few times. Easier than driving out to a hairdresser in some nearby town. And Peter probably doesn’t care much about the cut being uneven here and there. “So,” he says and snips the first strands. “What happened on the fourteenth, then?”

“I had been assembling gas masks for them for almost a week. But that morning they discovered I had poked holes in all of them with a paperclip.”

“That must have pissed them off.”

“Quite.”

“Did they hurt you?”

Peter flicks some hair off his pants. “Not as much as you’d think.”

Tony glances down. He can’t really see Peter’s face from this angle. If what Natasha said is true, Peter lived in a SHIELD facility since he was five. Barely knew anything else. How does a kid like that just decide to turn his back on it all?

Although— Maybe two months as a captive in an entirely different world changes your perspective a little. “Did you like working for Zodiac?”

“I didn’t like making weapons for them.”

“Reasonable.”

“It was just different. They’d get drunk in the evenings. They liked playing card games, and were rude to their boss, and made fun of my Spanish and had fist fights.”

“Rowdy. Yes.” It says a lot about Peter’s experience with SHIELD that he sooner found the luxury of self-discovery when he was a hostage, imprisoned in a foreign country by a criminal network. Perhaps there is more than one reason why Peter didn’t attempt to escape.

“I knew they did a, a ‘mix and match’ DNA thing,” Peter says. “I didn’t know your DNA was in the mix, too. But if there is anything you want to know, you can ask now, and I’ll tell you. It won’t matter soon, anyway.”

He says it matter-of-factly, but with an undertone like he expects to be executed in the morning. Tony once read about the barbers in revolutionary France, cutting off women’s hair before they got guillotined. “Natasha will stick with you, you know.”

“Right, of course.”

There is a lot Tony wants to know, obviously. And this might be his only chance to get the truth. He’s going home tomorrow, where Pepper will most likely shackle him to the dinner table, and he and Natasha and Clint will go back to not being on speaking terms at all. “I lived in captivity too. Forced to manufacture weapons.”

“I read about that,” Peter says. “For me it wasn’t—I just assembled stuff and carried crates around. I don’t think they really realized who or what I was.”

“Why didn’t they kill you?”

“I don’t know. It seemed they were going to in Cincinnati, when they caught me. But then they had another argument and two guys punched each other, and I passed out, and when I woke up I was in Mexico.”

“If you turn around, I can get the back.”

Peter turns so his feet are now inside the bathtub. Tony continues snipping away.

“Do you know why they used my DNA? How they got it? Who else they stole DNA from?”

“No. If it’s any consolation, I think they… Well. They used it all. It’s gone now.”

“Used it all on you?”

“No. There were others. Other kids.”

“Oh,” Tony says. “Not anymore?”

Peter uses one foot to sweep some hair together. “No. Not anymore.”

Tony realizes suddenly that the gun is no longer tucked against Peter’s back. He wonders where it is.

“Where are you going tomorrow?” Peter asks.

“Home.”

“Do you have family?”

“Nah,” Tony says. It’s a lie he has told so many times it comes out easily. “But it’d still like to be home well in time for Christmas. I have a tree to decorate. I got Christmas fever. Christmas disease.”

“Christmas disease is actually an existing disorder. A rare genetic blood clotting disorder that can be fatal. It occurs in about 1 in 25,000 male births in the US.”

“Ah,” Tony says. A few hours ago, this boy was threatening to kill them, leave them for dead, and now they’re chatting about family and Christmas. Peter seems surprisingly calm.

Something feels off about that.

-

It all makes a lot more sense when Natasha shakes him awake at some point in the dead of the night and hisses that Peter has disappeared.

The only thing he took was the pencil. He left the gun, even left the first aid manual scrunched up under his pillow. Natasha smoothens it out on the nightstand, under the light of her phone. Endless series of numbers and letters are scribbled all over the margins and in between the lines of instructions for the Heimlich maneuver.

Tony wouldn’t exactly consider it a sign of a healthy, well-adjusted mind. “Random gibberish.” Or, perhaps, a terrifying self-portrait.

“It’s not random.” Her finger drifts past the rows of letters and numbers. “Those are license plate numbers. And those are coordinates.”

“Coordinates for what?”

“Don’t know.”

-

Tony is pretty sure it is pointless, and Natasha knows it is pointless. Everything they have learned about Peter so far makes it pretty clear that this kid knows how to disappear and won’t half-ass it. Also, honestly; not his mission, not his problem.

But he still makes the short track to the railroad, disgruntled, at three AM, to see if there’s any sign of Peter hopping on another train, while Natasha looks for clues around the vicinity of the motel. The cold air feels like impending rain. The riverbed in Mexico at three PM had been scorching hot, but a November night in Texas is too freaking cold when you’re in a t-shirt.

Natasha should have seen this coming from a mile away. It was clear from the get-go that Peter had zero trust in them. And in hindsight, Tony can pinpoint the exact moment when Peter decided to hitch a ride simply to get the hell away from Zodiac, and then wait for the opportune moment to slip away: in the helicopter, when he had tucked his gun away, pulled his cap down and asked: ‘what’s our plan?’

He walks down the same road they had taken on their way here; gently downward-sloping, with cracked asphalt. It abruptly ends near the railroad tracks. Tony rounds a windowless building of solid, grey cement. The door won’t budge. He tries to study the packed dirt near the tracks for footprints and finds none. An empty shipping container standing nearby is just that: empty.

Tires grind against gravel, shadows shifting against moving headlights as a car pulls up right behind him. A man gets out; tall and grim. Clint Eastwood-ish. An eye-patch away from being a Bond villain.

“Evening,” Tony says, feeling like he is standing right in the jaws of a beartrap.

The man strolls closer and then pauses, leaning his weight on one leg. “Mr. Stark. Long way from home.”

“Not in the mood for a selfie, pal.”

“I think you know that’s not why I’m here. Where is the mutant?”

“Who is asking?”

The man whips out something black, leather, flips it open. Flashes a shiny badge.

“Oh wow. SHIELD. Hey, it’s the good guys!”

“What happened to agent Barton? Where is the mutant?”

“I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m here on a business trip.”

“That’s not what your friend James Rhodes implied when he disturbed our investigation at Zodiac’s base.”

Tony feels his pulse pick up, but he turns further towards the man, clasping his hands behind his back like he doesn’t have a care in the world. “Rhodey is such a gossip, don’t believe a word he says. Did he make up another story about how I got drunk and peed in the suit? That never happened, and certainly not at my fortieth birthday party.”

“Who exactly hired you to sabotage our mission, Mr. Stark?”

“I retired. And even before that— Please, give me some credit. Iron Man was never for hire.”

“Where is the mutant.”

Tony plays up his irritation. “My guy, swear to god, I have no clue—”

The man takes a few sudden steps closer and grabs Tony by one shoulder, shoving him until his back hits the wall of the windowless building. And then he feels the barrel of a gun pressing against his stomach, just below his ribcage. “You could walk away right now, Mr. Stark,” the man says in a low voice. “Tell me what I need to know and walk away. Go home. Let us deal with the rest. We won’t be bothering each other.”

It’s true. It’s true. Not his mission, not his problem. Morgan is waiting for him at home and he’s standing in some one-gas-station town with a gun jammed against his side.

“Or I could take you in,” the man says. “I could make you disappear. It doesn’t matter that you’re Tony Stark. The world hasn’t heard from you in four years. No one who has any power will come looking. Not even your lapdog Rhodes.”

Pepper would never even know what happened to him. Morgan would— “All right. Okay—listen. You’re talking about the kid, right? Who was at the Zodiac base? Yeah, I saw him. All right. But I didn’t care. I was there to retrieve some stolen DNA that you morons lost. And the kid stole one of their cars. Ouch—” the barrel of the gun presses harder into his stomach and Tony hisses. “Fuck you, man. He stole a car and drove off. Said something about his Spanish being good enough to make it on his own. And that’s all she wrote. He’s still in Mexico, dumbass.”

“See, here’s the thing,” the man says coldly. “I don’t believe you. I think you know exactly what happened to your stolen DNA. And knowing what you know, you would never just let that mutant walk away. We know you’re staying at a motel in this town. Why are you wandering around at three AM, Mr. Stark? What are you looking for?”

“Are you implying you used my DNA to mutate little kids? Because that’s fucked up, man. Why don’t we talk about that for a moment?”

The man yanks him forward and then slams him back against the wall. Tony wheezes out a pained breath. He had forgotten about his bruised ribs until this moment. Fingers encircle his throat, cutting off his air. He grabs at the man’s arm, pries at the fingers. They don’t budge. Black spots dance in his vision.

When he is finally released he crumples to the ground, embarrassingly. “Fuck you,” he rasps, and spits out sand, pushing himself up on hands and knees.

A foot slams down on his back and presses him back down, face pressed into the dirt. “I’m not a patient man, Mr. Stark. Last chance to tell me what you know, or I’ll call in my men currently scouring all motels to join us here so we can move on to the water boarding.”

Drawing SHIELD away from the motels, where Clint is still sleeping his concussion away, sounds like a good idea anyways. “Do your worst,” he grates.

The man yanks a walkie-talkie away from his belt, cold fury in his eyes—

—someone drops out of the sky and slams down on top of him. Two bodies roll through the dirt, the smaller one ends up on top, fist raised.

“Hey, Ray,” Peter says.

“You fu—”

Peter knocks him out, hard. Ray slumps against the ground, his head lolls to one side. Peter breathes out slowly, studying the man’s face for a while. Then he slides off and stands, shoulders drawn up.

Tony braces an arm against the wall as he pushes himself up.

They silently watch each other for a few moments.

“Why the hell are you still here?” Tony asks. “You should have been across a state line by now.”

“Why did you lie to him?”

“What?"

“Why did you lie to him? What was in it for you?”

“You don’t understand,” Tony says. It’s not an accusation. This kid has probably never had a friend, a parent, anyone who risked their own wellbeing for his, even in simple ways. He fundamentally cannot understand. It’s confirmed by the way Peter looks at him. Puzzled, and a little intrigued.

“You should be long gone by now,” Tony repeats. He carefully rubs his throat.

“I tried to hitch a ride first,” Peter says. “But then I recognized a number plate and quickly changed tacs.”

“You didn’t even take the gun.”

Peter rubs his hands up and down his own arms. “I don’t like guns. How many of them are here?”

“No idea. They’re searching the motels.” Tony has a nagging suspicion that he knows how these agents traced them down.

“Good,” Peter says. "The SHIELD agents and the other SHIELD agents can keep each other nice and busy at the motel. I hear a train coming. Three minutes away. We can jump on.”

“Clint and Natasha are not SHIELD. Not this SHIELD.”

“I’m tired of playing ‘spot the difference’,” Peter says. “Whatever. They can fight it out.”

“I’m going back for them.”

“Suit yourself. You’re weird, man. You keep saying you’re going to ditch them, and then keep putting yourself in danger for them. What’s that about?”

Tony doesn’t want to answer that. “You saved Clint,” he says. “I didn’t make you carry him to the chopper. I just asked.”

“You promised me money.”

“Yeah, well, you never planned on sticking around long enough to cash it in, were you?”

“What’s your point?”

“That maybe you do understand.”

Peter sets his shoulders. “I’m not going with you.” His eyes are fierce.

“I’m not asking you to. I don’t want you to. That train’s coming in about two minutes, right?”

“Right.”

“You seem to have the USA map branded into your brain or something. Where’s it going to pass through?”

“Bowie, Stoneburg, Ringgold, Terral—”

“Get out of this town. Get off at Bowie. Wait for us there.”

“Wait for you,” Peter repeats, voice flat.

“Don’t go out into this world on your own. We can protect you. I know you don’t like to hear it, but I think you know it’s true.”

“Right, of course,” Peter says. Exactly the same way he had said those words before, when he sat on the edge of the bathtub and Tony told him Natasha would help him. When he had already known he would sneak out as soon as he saw the chance.

“I’m serious. Look me in the eye. I’m serious, kid. Wait for us.”

Peter looks him in the eye. His face is blank. “Wait for you,” he repeats. He nods, and then he turns, sprinting across the railroad tracks until he reaches the other side where he crouches next to a pile of bricks.

Tony waits for the train to pass. Once it has, Peter is nowhere to be seen.

He turns around and approaches the SHIELD agent on the ground, winces around the pain as he bends down. He takes the gun and the walkie-talkie. Pushes the guy over on his stomach and wrestles his coat away from him.

He puts the coat on, turns the collar up high, and then starts walking back towards Rolling Meadows Inn.

Chapter Text

When the dust settled in Sokovia, the city of Novi Grad faced 177 civilian casualties and billions of dollars in damage. Because of an A.I. Tony had created.

There’s plenty of people who end up on death row over far less.

SHIELD seemed like they finally had their shit together. Tony remembers riding back home on the helicarrier, Natasha and Fury a few yards away from him, making plans about addressing the media, debriefing governments, relocating the Avengers to a new facility.

When he landed in New York, Tony found four missed calls from Pepper. They had had an ugly break-up only two weeks earlier, radio silence ever since, and it felt reassuring that she had seen the news and still wanted to know he was okay.

Tony called her back, but she didn’t ask if he was okay. “I’m pregnant,” was her opening statement.

“Oh,” Tony said. “Congratulations…?”

“And I’m keeping it.”

It was only at that point that Tony realized what she was actually telling him.

“Are you hearing me, Tony?”

“Sorry. It’s… been a day. You’ve seen the news?”

“I spent the afternoon having a meltdown. Did something happen? Are you in trouble?”

“Don’t turn on the news,” Tony said. “I’m coming.”

He didn’t attend that evening’s press conference. People worldwide were clamoring for an explanation, for someone to take accountability.

Tony disappeared.

-

There is a black jeep in the motel parking lot, the engine running. Tony watches, his back pressed against a brick wall. The woman behind the wheel has her window rolled down, elbow propped up to hold her walkie-talkie near her ear. She does not have the agitated look of a hunter who locked onto their target. But Tony guesses she is in communication with a partner who is already inside.

Natasha checked in alone, so the desk clerk won’t rat them out. And no one who wants to keep a low profile is going to go around banging on every single door. If Clint just keeps his head down, these people might eventually give up and move to the next motel. Unless the evil SHIELD branch has enough manpower to stake out every motel in Chico — there probably aren’t that many.

He shifts his weight as he considers his options. If he tries to intervene, to take someone out, he might end up just drawing attention to this motel. He has never wished so strongly that he had some basic, basic combat training or spy skills. God, he really is dead weight to his fellow travelers. They’ll probably be happy to see him ride off into the sunset tomorrow.

There is a flash of light and a muffled gunshot from inside.

The driver shoots up in her seat. She opens her car door, steps out and lifts the walkie talkie, her other hand reaching for the gun on her belt.

Tony scrambles to grab the walkie talkie he stole off the other SHIELD agent, and presses the button to jam the signal. The woman looks down at her radio, shakes it, frustrated, and in that moment, Natasha appears in the doorway of the motel, gun out. They stare at each other across the asphalt divide. The woman hurries to raise her own weapon.

Natasha shoots first, then rushes forward. She has reached the black jeep before the woman even hits the ground.

Tony steps away from the wall and moves in, too. He raises his hands when Natasha’s head snaps up at him.

Her shoulders sag. “Did she call it in?”

Tony shakes his head and holds out his own walkie-talkie. He releases the button.

It immediately jumps to life. “Switch frequencies!” someone barks, staticky. And then the channel goes dead.

“And now they’ll establish which team member is no longer responding,” Natasha says, grimly. “We have minutes to get out of here. Leave that engine running and help me get Clint.”

They push back into the motel. There is a body face-down in the hallway. Several doors are ajar, but people give startled yelps and slam them shut when Tony rounds the corner.

Clint is already up and stumbling about, grasping at his bow and backpack. “Getaway, m’guessing?” he says when he sees them.

“Come on,” Natasha slings her arm around him and drags him back to the door. Tony grabs the backpacks and yanks a blanket off the bed and follows.

“Where’s the kid?” Clint protests.

“Later,” Natasha snaps.

They shove Clint into the backseat and jump into the black jeep. Natasha guns the engine, burning rubber as she backs out of the space and pulls off the lot.

“The kid,” Clint says. “The kid.”

“I spoke to him,” Tony says.

“Seat belts!” Natasha snaps. “And what?”

“He was at the railroad. When we realized SHIELD was in town, I told him to get on the train and wait for us at the next town.”

“Wait for us,” Natasha repeats, sounding about as incredulous as Peter had.

“I had no way to keep him around, the only thing I could do was try to gain his trust.”

“Trust. Less than an hour after he tried to escape from us.”

“He saw SHIELD was coming for us. He saw their agent attack me. That changes shit, okay? He saw confirmation that we’re not on their side.”

“You were attacked?”

“I’m fine.”

Headlights swerve in the distance and Natasha takes a sharp turn left, muttering Russian expletives. “How did they even know— I checked Clint’s stuff for tracking devices, the desk clerk didn’t have a clue…”

Tony steels himself. “I think they intercepted a phone call I made when we arrived.”

Every line in Natasha’s body goes tense. “You made a phone call?” she asks in a low voice.

“Look. We both thought SHIELD didn’t know about my involvement. There was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to make a quick call.”

“And what’s so important,” she says, her eyes shooting flames, “that you took the risk, slight as it was, for one damn phone call?”

Tony sets his jaw and looks away. “I called Rhodey,” he says. “I was supposed to meet with him, didn’t want him to worry. Apparently he did, and he flew all the way to Monterrey where he ran into some SHIELD people. I told him the whole organization was compromised and he should stay away but… I didn’t consider that him running into SHIELD meant that they’d know I was somehow involved.”

“You didn’t consider…”

“Yes, okay, I’m sorry. I’m not a superspy. I’m just a dummy with a bit of technical know-how.”

The technical know-how should have been enough, though. That’s the painful part.

There’s no way they bugged Pepper’s phone. Tony created layer upon layer of security. FRIDAY continuously spoofs her GPS location, and her internet connection is rerouted through a different IP address every ten seconds.

But SHIELD could use processing algorithms to capture specific keywords and pull his phone call based on that, or perhaps even based on his voice, when he made the call with some random, unsecure phone. Tony should have had alarm bells blaring in his head as soon as Pepper mentioned that Rhodey ran into some SHIELD soldiers. He should have known SHIELD would already be trying to track him.

Natasha turns onto a winding road into the shelter of a forest.

“I’m sorry,” Tony repeats. “I wasn’t trying to screw us over.”

“You did the best you could.” Natasha doesn’t even sound angry anymore. Just depressingly resigned.

There are no headlights of following cars in their rearview mirror. But they don’t have much of a head start and they’re driving in the enemy’s car that can most likely be tracked as easily as the helicopter.

“Where did you tell him to go?” Natasha asks when they come upon a crossroads.

“Bowie.” It’s there on the sign, with a large white arrow pointing right.

Natasha turns the wheel left and starts driving towards Jacksboro instead, flank speed.

-

They pull over at another roadside motel. Natasha wraps a scarf around her elbow and smashes in a car window, cuts the alarm, hotwires the car while Tony heaves Clint and their luggage from one backseat to the other.

They are back on the road in less than thirty seconds.

“All right,” Natasha murmurs when they get to the interstate. “I think we’re good now.” And she turns in the direction of Bowie this time. “Clint. Go back to sleep.”

“Yeah,” Clint says. “That’s gonna happen.”

-

They reach Bowie in twenty minutes. They enter the town by a bridge that crosses over the railroad.

“Where exactly did you tell him to wait?”

“I didn’t tell him anything in particular. I assume he’ll stick close to the tracks.”

If Natasha thinks he is an incompetent moron, she doesn’t let on. “This is a gamble,” she says. “We can’t afford to stay here long. But if we don’t find him and move on, and he is waiting for us, we’ll be making a really big fucking mistake.”

“Where do you think he’d go?” Tony asks. Natasha probably has a better gage of what a SHIELD-trained child soldier’s logic looks like.

“He’d hop off at the more densely pop—populated part of town,” Clint puts in.

“If there is such a thing.” Natasha glances pointedly around at the white, cabin-like houses that are evenly spaced apart. “My wager, he’ll wait somewhere where he’d be able to see us coming. We need to get out in the open and let him find us. But not too much in the open, because we’re only one town over from where SHIELD is still looking.”

She turns the car onto the parking lot by a school and lets it roll in neutral until it reaches a parking space in the far corner, under a tree. She turns in her seat. “SHIELD sent you in,” she tells Clint, “and knows you’re involved,” she tells Tony. “I’m the only one they don’t know about, and I didn’t get my new hairdo for nothing. So, the two of you are going to lay low and take a nice nap in this car, and I’ll take an early morning stroll along the railroad tracks.”

She exits and closes the door quietly.

“There’s a blanket somewhere back there,” Tony says.

“Thanks,” Clint murmurs, and pulls it closer.

“How’s the head? And the leg?”

“Fucking agony, but I think I’ll live.”

“Was looking dodgy for a while.”

“Yeah,” Clint says. “Thanks.”

“I didn’t do anything. The kid carried you.”

“Yeah. Even though he thought I was there to drag him back to the people who used him as a literal blood bag for years.”

Tony turns in his seat. “What does that mean?”

“Nat didn’t tell you?”

“She doesn’t like me much, haven’t you noticed?”

“Hmmm,” Clint says. “Probably because you had a god-complex and created an AI that caused innocent people to die and then disappeared and left us to deal with the whole fucking bedlam that followed, and then didn’t show up when we asked for help when chemical weapons were stolen from Nigeria, of during the Singapore bombing, or when Steve disappeared.”

“I didn’t get those messages,” Tony says. “Wait. Rogers disappeared?”

“We found him. He’s doing okay.” He says it in a way that makes Tony think he’s not entirely okay.

Whatever. Not his problem. “I retired. What do you mean, literal blood bag?”

Clint sniffs and rolls onto his side, facing away from Tony.

-

Tony must have fallen asleep at some point. He wakes up stiff, sore and cold to his very core. He hears the noise that woke him up, again. There is movement in the side mirror. Tony grips his stolen gun.

“Relax, dude,” Clint says from behind him and Tony jolts. “It’s them.”

It is them. Natasha opens the back door and Peter quietly gets in. Tony realizes only now that he had one hundred percent assumed that Peter would not be waiting for them here. And now his thoughts and assumptions need to rearrange around a new truth: Peter wants help. Badly enough that he’s willing to trust people he rationally has very little reason to trust.

Peter is still in his black shirt and Clint wordlessly passes the blanket over. Peter wraps it around himself and exhales shakily.

“Kiddo,” Tony says. “It’s good to see you.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, without making eye contact. “Let’s put some miles between us and them.” He leans back in the seat, his jaw set. Perhaps this is mostly just a reluctant partnership for him. But there is an ‘us’, at least.

Natasha gets in and starts the engine.

“What’s the plan?” Clint asks.

“I’m gonna drive. You’re gonna sleep.”

“Solid,” Clint says.

Tony pulls off his stolen coat and throws it at Clint. “You both need to stay warm.”

“There’s over 1300 hypothermia related deaths in the USA each year,” Peter says.

“That’s what I’m talking about. Pete, seat belt. I bet there’s a lot of no-seat-belt related deaths in the USA each year.”

“Around 2500.” Peter shifts under the blanket as he buckles up. Natasha turns the car back towards the interstate.

“I have an address in Rose Hill, Tennessee,” Tony says on a whim. “Why don’t we head in that direction?”

“What. A safe house?”

“That SHIELD sure as hell doesn’t know about.”

Natasha glances at the signs overhead, turns on her indicator. “Onward and eastward.”

-

Tony sleeps another two hours and then takes the wheel from Natasha. Clint is sound asleep in the back, coat draped over his face. Peter sleeps too, which Tony takes as a good sign: the kid at least trusts them enough to not be constantly watching his back.

“He said he’d stick with us as long as we were ‘useful’ to him,” Natasha murmurs as she slides into the passenger seat. She sounds almost fond about it.

They drive straight towards the rising sun. The glare on the windshield is blinding. When Natasha falls asleep, Tony wriggles off her sunglasses and slides them on his own nose.

He promised to call Pepper first thing in the morning. And if it’s early morning in the state of Ankansas, it is no longer early morning in the state of New York. But he doesn’t see any way to call home without putting them all in danger yet again. An email should be safe, but where can he publicly access a computer without the risk of being the topic of someone’s morning Instagram story? He could ask Natasha to do it for him, but… But. He kept his family a secret for almost five years. Knowing Morgan was safely hidden away always gave him peace of mind. It’s not like Clint ever told them about his family until it was absolutely inevitable.

“Breakfast,” Natasha murmurs.

Clint makes a noise of agreement from underneath the coat. Tony tilts his head to one side to watch Peter in the rearview mirror. The boy is awake, too, his eyes darting past road signs as he is no doubt taking stock of where exactly they are.

Clint pulls the coat away. “How much cash you got, anyways?”

“Plenty,” Natasha says.

“I want warm butter croissants.”

“This town has some of the world’s largest watermelons,” Peter says.

“You don’t say.”

“268.8 pounds.”

Everyone seems less on edge, more assured that SHIELD won’t find them here. But Tony’s anxiety is back with a vengeance, knowing Pepper is waiting, wondering. He turns off the I-30 at Hope, Arkansas, fingers drumming against the wheel. “We need to fuel up, too.”

“Or change vehicles,” Natasha says. “We abandoned the SHIELD jeep in the same motel parking lot. Once this car gets reported stolen, they’ll know our license plates.”

Clint grumbles. “Morning rush hour is a terrible time to steal a car.”

“Oh please,” Natasha says. “Left, here.”

She has him turn onto a cracked, weed-riddled road, and pull over on the roadside.

“I’ll hitch a ride back into town,” she says. “Get more food and a new car. We’ll dump this one in a ditch and then continue on.”

Tony accepts defeat. He won’t be able to get to a computer right now. It’s another ten hours to Rose Hill, Tennessee, where he’ll have access to FRIDAY and can call Pepper on a secure line for as long as he wants. Explain the whole thing. “Please hurry,” he says, trying not to sound too pleading.

She gives him a long look, then nods. “Keep my sunglasses,” she says. “Don’t want passersby to recognize you.”

-

“At least the weather is nice,” Clint says. The car door is open on his side. He perches on the edge of his seat, the first aid kit in one hand.

“Huh?” Peter says. He, like Tony, has stepped out of the car. He left the hat on the back seat, Tony notices: one less barrier between himself and the rest of the world.

“Sunny,” Clint elaborates.

“There are around 700 heat-related deaths in the US each year,” Peter says.

“Ah,” Clint says.

Tony is mainly just stretching his legs, wandering aimlessly, needing an outlet for the unbearable tension building inside him. Peter seems to have a more particular goal in mind; slowly moving around the car. He crouches near the front and feels around the edges of the number plate, then starts ripping the metal away like it’s wet paper.

Tony watches him step around the car and, after a rattling sound, Peter moves away from the car with two mangled license plates under his arm and starts towards the trees.

“Where are you going?”

“Burying these,” Peter says. “And taking a piss.”

Tony leans against the car next to the open door and they watch the kid disappear between the trees.

“He’s tough,” Clint says.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“In more than one way, I mean.”

Tony almost makes a joke about it all being his DNA but manages to swallow it down. He has always joked about things that make him uneasy, but this is a different sort of unease. The sort of feeling he gets in the pit of his stomach every time he lies in bed and tries to wrap his mind around the size of the universe or the endlessness of death. Unsettled. Some things are too fucked up to joke about.

“He told me he’s the only one left,” Tony says. “Of the… Whatever it was.”

“Hm-hmm,” Clint says, and doesn’t elaborate. He opens the first aid kit and rummages around in it.

Well, screw them if they refuse to tell him anything. Tony turns away from him, stretches his arms over his head until his back pops, rotates his shoulders.

Peter returns. “I can do that,” he says. He looks at Clint fumbling with the bandage.

“Since you rewrote the entire first-aid manual,” Clint says. “Sure?”

“Yeah.” He kneels in front of Clint. Clint hikes one pantleg up higher and Peter grabs the end of the bandage, pulling it taut. “I’m sorry,” he says. Pretty randomly, as far as Tony is concerned.

Clint seems to agree. “The fuck are you sorry for?”

Peter shrugs and focuses on wrapping Clint’s leg with practiced movements. “I thought you knew. I thought you were just an asshole.”

“I want to help you,” Clint says. “You believe that now, right?”

“Why, though?”

“We don’t want anything from you.”

Peter secures the end of the bandage. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

“You—Nat has a safe house in Ohio.”

“And I’m supposed to, what, live there?”

“Well…” Clint says, and then visibly doesn’t know what to say.

“It’s fine anyway,” Peter says. “Not like I have a better plan. Not yet, at least.”

“I don’t think there was time for a real plan,” Tony puts in. “Natasha had to intercept the mission and Fury doesn’t know who he can trust. They have one safe place in the country. She just wants to get you home free and then rethink things from there.”

Peter doesn’t show much response to that, but Clint gives Tony an appreciative nod. “You’re sticking with us then, kid?” he asks Peter.

“For now,” Peter says.

-

Natasha returns in a dark grey, windowless van that says Hideaway Pizza! on the side. “They won’t report it stolen,” she says as she hands out water bottles and bananas.

“Because?”

“They had a drug lab in the basement of their pizza place.”

They drive the old stolen car into the forest, twigs snapping under the tires, and push it the last few yards until it disappears between reddish-green shrubbery. Peter hauls a large, fallen branch closer to cover the rear bumper.

They get in the stolen van and Natasha takes the wheel again, demanding her sunglasses back with a quietly outstretched hand. “I bought a notepad,” she says, glancing at Peter in the rearview mirror.

Peter peers into the plastic shopping bags, and then up at her, suspiciously. “Why?”

“You like writing, right?”

“I don’t like writing,” Peter says, but he takes the notepad anyway and tucks it away in the storage compartment on his side.

-

“I spy with my little eye,” Clint says, “something yellow.”

“The color-based variation of this game is mostly recommended for pre-schoolers,” Peter says.

“My bad,” Clint says. “How do teenagers with an eidetic memory play it? I spy with my little eye, something that begins with ‘L’ in Spanish.”

“The windshield wipers.”

Tony takes a sidelong glance at Natasha’s watch. They are creeping closer to noon as they creep closer to the state border between Arkansas and Tennessee. It is officially no longer morning. He wonders if Pepper got any sleep last night. What she told Morgan over breakfast.

Unfortunately, Rose Hill Tennessee is on the far east side of the state. They won’t arrive until late afternoon.

“I spy with my little eye,” Clint says. “Something that can exist in three stages of matter.”

“Every element can exist in three stages of matter,” Peter says, irritably. “It is just a matter of enough freezing and high pressure.”

“It starts with an ‘A’ in Spanish.”

“I don’t need more clues, I knew what you were referring to, I was just saying you weren’t factually correct.”

Tony slowly exhales, pressing the pads of his fingers against his eyelids.

“Take a nap,” Natasha suggests in a low voice, and Tony feels a flash of irritation. He knows it’s an irrational and unfair reaction, so he pushes it back down.

“Yeah,” he says gruffly. “So. Are you ever going to forgive me for Ultron or what?”

She sets her jaw and shifts gears as she overtakes a truck. “It’s been five years, Tony,” she finally says as she shifts gears again and merges. “If we met somewhere in the park, I’d invite you for a cup of coffee. But I’m on a mission, and if I got a choice in who I had around as back-up, you would be the last person on my list.”

Sure. Fair enough.

“But,” she continues, “you are still on the list.”

“And it’s a short list,” Clint says from the back.

-

He takes the wheel again for the final few hours. They approach Rose Hill, Tennessee during the winddown of rush hour and creep ahead — Tony frequently and impatiently changing lanes — until they can finally turn off the I-40. The exit spits them out into a quiet town. Telephone wires, a truck turning at a stoplight, Christmas lights dangle from street signs, the shadows are long in the setting sun. It’s a week from Thanksgiving. They pass a familiar gas station, where Tony once stood in the phone booth to apologize to Pepper for being selfish and stupid and making her believe he was dead.

The weight of failure presses down on him.                           

He pulls up by the house with the overgrown front yard. The neighbor’s house has a ‘for sale’ sign and already looks deserted. Good. No snoopers. “Full disclosure,” he says. “It’s not entirely a… traditional safe house. It’s a friend. With the right tech.”

“Just don’t get us caught, Stark,” Natasha says, but she gets out of the car readily enough.

Tony follows quickly, practically vibrating out of his skin with nervous energy. He just needs to get the introductions over with and then grab a phone and duck into a bedroom to finally, finally call Pepper.

Clint stays in the car, hands wrapped around his injured leg. Peter gets out but stays on the sidewalk, his eyes on the junction in the distance.

On the front porch are two wicker chairs in need of repair, and wilted plants in cracked flowerpots. Tony kicks one, then rings the doorbell. A light immediately jumps on in the hallway, but it takes almost a minute of rummaging around before the door is finally yanked open, scuffing against the floorboards.

Harley is wearing a suit that is loose at the shoulders, the tie at half-mast. “Hey. Woah,” he says, and then, spotting Natasha behind him: “Holy shit.”

“Why are you dressed to the fucking nines?” Tony asks.

“What? I have a date.”

“I need FRIDAY.”

“Yeah, okay,” Harley says. “This is only the second weirdest way you’ve ever barged into my house. You know where she is.”

“Come on,” Tony tells Natasha. He trips over his own feet in his haste to step off the porch.

“Nice to see you anyways,” Harley calls after him, and leaves the front door open as he wanders back inside.

Tony marches up the side of the house, beating a low-hanging branch out of his way. The garden is still the same wilderness it always was. Heavy sunflowers with browning petals hang weeping over the fence. The grass is knee-high. Tony kicks his way through until he reaches the garage door. Natasha is quiet behind him; she’s the sort of person who rarely asks for clarification, even when she has no idea what is going on. She always prefers to figure everything out herself.

Tony presses his thumb against the fingerprint scanner. Almost there. It lights up green. Almost there, almost there. The garage door swings open. The inside is a stark contrast to the rest of the property. It’s a little messy – Harley is in here a lot, Tony knows, but he visibly takes good care of the equipment. It’s been maybe four months since Tony last visited. He knows his way around. Past the first row of monitors, past the CNC router, straight towards the softly glowing panel in the back. “FRIDAY?” he asks, and the panel lights up.

“It’s good to hear from you, boss,” she says, and Tony wants to cry. “Yeah,” he says roughly, curbing any display of emotion while Natasha is next to him. “Harley’s cell phone line still secure, too?”

“All communications fully encrypted and untraceable.”

Tony gives Natasha a nod. “You just go and— FRIDAY can help you reach whoever you need to reach to— I’ll take my own call inside.”

He leaves her in FRIDAY’s care and jogs back to the house. Harley is in front of the mirror, tugging at his fringe, glances up at him. “Hey, are you—?”

“I need your phone,” Tony cuts in.

“I’m supposed to leave in like fifteen minutes,” Harley says as he digs it out. “And your car is blocking mine.”

“Okay, well—” Tony says, and then turns and rushes upstairs, searching for Pepper’s number in Harley’s contacts. He pushes through a bedroom – probably Harley’s mother’s room, he doesn’t care – and onto the balcony as he presses the phone against his ear.

“Hello?” Pepper says, tentatively.

“I’m sorry,” Tony says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Tony. Jesus. I should hope so.”

“Is Morgan all right?”

“Angry that you left on a business trip without saying goodbye. What was I supposed to say? Are you safe?”

“I am. The place we were before, where I called you, they traced the call and we had to leave, I couldn’t call you, I had no…”

“Are you safe.”

“I am, I said I am.”

“Say a little more, please. You’re… This is Harley’s number.”

“Yes, a secure line. SHIELD was tracking us before, that’s why I couldn’t just call back. They lost our trail by now. I’m coming home. Listen, you can just call Rhodey, as long as FRIDAY keeps the line encrypted. Tell him to take the quinjet to Harley’s place, pick me up. I’d be home by midnight, honey.”

“I’m having a little trouble taking your word for it this time.”

Tony exhales and leans his head back against the brick wall. “I’m sorry,” he says. “For fucking everything up. Again.”

“What happened? It’s that DNA thing you’ve been obsessing over, isn’t it?”

“Clint and Nat are here,” Tony says. “Clint is injured. And. And. There’s a kid involved, Pep.”

Pepper breathes out.

“I love you. I’m sorry. I’m safe. Will you send the quinjet?”

“Well, yes,” she says in a flat voice. “I’d hardly ask you to hitchhike or fare-dodge your way home.”

“Beats hotwiring cars and jumping on freight trains,” Tony says, and Pepper makes a concerned noise. “FRIDAY will tell Rhodey where to land it. The usual spot. Can I talk to Morgan?”

“I just put her in bed. But yes.” He hears her move around the house. The way she walks up the stairs. It’s her angry walk. But Tony is on his way home, and he has been an expert on getting Pepper’s forgiveness for many, many years. The heaviness in his chest is lifting.

“Hello who is this?” comes Morgan’s sleepy but formal voice.

That heaviness drops away entirely. “Hi sweetheart, it’s daddy.”

“Oh!” she says, her voice dull with sleep. “Where—Where are you?”

“On my way home, I promise.”

“You missed pancake day.”

“I missed you, honey. When you wake up, I’ll be home.”

“Okay,” she murmurs. “Can we go swimming?”

“You know I hate swimming. We’ll climb some trees.”

“I’ll go to sleep, then.”

“You do that, sweetheart. Love you, love you, love you. Night, night.”

There is a quiet rustling, and then Pepper takes the phone again. “I’ll get in touch with Rhodey right away,” she murmurs. “This isn’t—settled. We need to talk more, okay? We need to talk, Tony. Just—not over the phone.”

“I know.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too. See you soon.”

She hangs up.

He leans back and breathes out slowly. A heavy fog slowly lifts from his mind. He realizes now it has been there since the Zodiac base blew up in his face. He can slow down. Like diving into a calm, clear pool. He sees, he feels. The evening, clear and cold. The sky, darkening in the east but steel-grey in the west. The crescent moon, faint behind puffy clouds.

Natasha, standing quietly in the doorway to the balcony.

Tony doesn’t even need to ask how much she overheard. The answer is most likely ‘everything’, and if it isn’t everything, it’s enough for her to work out the rest.

“How old is she?” she asks.

Tony rubs his bare arms, feeling the goosebumps spread. “Four.”

He can see the puzzle pieces falling into place. She doesn’t ask anything else. “I can’t reach Fury,” she says, eyes solemn.

“Might he simply be napping?”

“No.”

“You think your safe house could be compromised?”

“Not sure if I want to roll the dice on it.”

Tony pockets Harley’s phone. “All right. That’s… Rhodey is coming with the quinjet.”

“Oh. Good.” Her voice is even. Tony thinks she looks displeased, but he can never really tell with her.

“Why don’t we get everyone inside.”

-

He gets downstairs and hugs Harley. “Hey kiddo. Good to see you.”

“Remembered your manners, did you?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know you when you’re stressed out.”

“How are you?” He starts fixing Harley’s tie. “Who managed to score a date with Harley Keener?”

“Oh. You know.” Harley looks sheepish.

“Your classmate with that panda backpack you like?”

“I guess I’ll cancel. I can’t believe you brought Avengers here and stuff. Should I make everyone some tea?”

“Your mother?”

“Won’t be home for a while. Dude. Is Hawkeye okay?”

Tony glances over his shoulder at Clint, stumbling down the hallway towards them. Peter follows behind and wipes his feet on the doormat, carefully closes the front door. His hands are covered by his sleeves: the coat Tony stole off the SHIELD agent hangs loosely around his shoulders, dwarfing him.

“Don’t cancel your date, though,” he says, turning back to Harley.

“I’ll go make some tea.” Harley disappears into the kitchen.

Clint sags into a chair. “So,” he says. He props his injured leg up on another chair. “Where the fuck are we? Your secret family home? That your secret kid?” He laughs, but when no one else does, his chuckles die away and his expression turns incredulous. “Wait, are we actually—?”

Tony lifts a hand “Let me stop you right there. Just….” He pulls out a chair for himself.

“Come sit,” Natasha tells Peter.

Peter doesn’t. He hovers in the doorway with his floppy sleeves. “Are you giving up?” he asks her. “If you’re giving up, tell me straight away, please. I’ll continue on my own.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The safe house is compromised. I heard you. And he is leaving.” He jerks his head in Tony’s direction.

“But I’m not,” Natasha says intently.

“What?” Tony says. “What are you talking about? I’m not leaving either. I’m not fucking leaving. I mean. We’re leaving. Rhodey is flying the quinjet this way and we’re going to drive that stolen van straight up the ramp and haul ass back to my place. We’re all going. No one knows about my place, even Fury doesn’t. You know, in case he’s being waterboarded right now. Natasha, for fuck’s sake.” He feels furious, though mostly with himself. That they got to a place where Natasha just assumed… And, worse, didn’t even give him shit for it, the way she always would in the past when Tony was being a selfish asshole. She didn’t even think it was worth picking a fight over.

“Okay,” Natasha says. “All right, Tony, I just didn’t… Thank you. That’s a good offer.”

“Where’s your place?” Clint asks. “Because, no offense, if it’s a Stark Tower-sized high-tech mansion, it might not take SHIELD all that long to find it if they put some actual effort in.”

“It’s a small house in the middle of nowhere. I live there with… with Pepper and, and our daughter.”

Clint’s expression lights up. “Oh, you actually have a kid?” he says. “What age?” Not patronizingly, or accusingly. Just with frank curiosity. Like a new dad meeting another new dad at the park.

“Four.”

“Huh,” Clint says. And then again, “hhhuh.”

“SHIELD doesn’t know about them?” Natasha asks. “They can’t find out?”

“No. Morgan goes to school, but we enrolled her with a different last name. Pepper works, but she uses a fake name, too. FRIDAY monitors everything about their online presence, it’s the safest place in the country.”

Harley bumps the door open with his hip, balancing mismatched cups on a tray. “It’s strawberry flavored,” he says. “Sorry. That’s all we have. I cancelled my date. Said I couldn’t make it on account of three Avengers sitting in my living room.”

“What?” Clint asks, alarmed.

“Relax, kidding. There’s people after you, right? I’ve known Tony for a while, I’m familiar with the standard operating procedures.”

“Seriously, who is this kid?” Clint asks Tony.

“Sorry about your date with backpack-kid, Harls,” Tony says.

“Don’t sweat it.”

“Any news? The neighbors are moving, I saw.” He personally does background checks on all of Harley’s neighbors to make sure none compromise the kid’s safety. When he and Pepper visit here, it’s always on the downlow, but you can never be too careful.

“Yeah,” Harley says, smile flattening out. “Their kid drowned in the pond in the backyard. You know. You look away for half a minute and it’s too late. That kind of story.”

“Jesus,” Tony abruptly sobers. Parents’ worst nightmare. It’s the first thing he did once Morgan started crawling: set up cameras facing the lake so FRIDAY can warn them in case she ever manages to slip away from them.

“Seven percent of all injury-related…” Peter starts, but then he swallows what he had been about to say. He finally sits at the table and picks up his cup of tea with sleeve-covered hands.

Tony is beginning to think it’s very much on purpose. “You can leave fingerprints here,” he says. “No one’s gonna find this place, there’s safety protocols like you wouldn’t believe. You’re safe.”

“There is a stolen pizza van in the driveway,” Peter says. “More than 85 percent of stolen vehicles are recovered within a year. And I saw a ‘neighborhood watch’ street sign.” He sips.

“No fun statistics for neighborhood watch?”

“Twelve percent of crimes reported through neighborhood watch are on people trying to force their way into their own homes after losing their keys.”

“Really?”

“No,” Peter says, and the corners of his mouth twitch.

Well, shit, he made a joke. Clint laughs, the sound rich. Natasha smirks. Harley hasn’t known Peter long enough to understand what’s funny. He just looks puzzled. “Are you an Avenger?” he asks Peter.

“I— No.”

“Okay. Do you want to play Super Smash Brothers while we wait for your ride?”

Peter stares. “No?”

Harley shrugs. “Your loss, man.”

Peter glances at Tony, as if to ask for help. And Tony realizes the kid is more out of his depth now than he has been for their entire journey so far.

“Bet you’ve never played videogames?” Clint asks him.

“I… No, I have. I did what kids did, when I was younger. Played and stuff. I was socialized through same-age peer interactions. And then twice a week they took my blood.”

“Oh, yeah. Dude, same. Story of my life,” Harley says. “Come on. Nothing better to do. I promise I’ll let you win.”

Peter looks down at his sleeves and clearly considers his options. “All right,” he says. He stands, the cup of tea clenched against his chest, and follows Harley into the hallway.

“No, but really,” Clint says. “Who the fuck is that kid?”

Tony sighs and leans back in his chair, closes his eyes. He listens to the two pairs of footsteps trudging up the stairs. “I’m sorry for the way I left,” he says. “I could have… I know things after Ultron were—not easy. For the team. And I had stuff going on, but I could have at least… I don’t know. Sent an email.”

“Yeah, you could have,” Clint says, easily. “Fuck you, Tony Stark. Could have at least sent a baby photo, you know I love baby photos.”

“Could have at least named her Natasha,” Natasha says. “After the Bartons betrayed me and had a boy.”

Out of all the people on their team, the three sitting at this table are easily the worst at communicating. But Tony knows his apology was just accepted.

Chapter Text

Peter tucks himself away into a corner of the quinjet, spends about ten minutes scribbling wildly on the notepad and then sleeps again, the blanket scrunched up around his legs. There seems to be an unspoken agreement that he gets the coat when he’s awake and the blanket when he’s asleep. The sleeve of his shirt has hiked up. There is a small circle of raised scar tissue on his left upper arm. It looks like the scar people used to get from the smallpox vaccine.

“That one is from a concoction of radioactive spider poison,” Natasha says when she catches Tony looking. “It killed four of the other kids. The experiments were put on hold after that.” Look at that. Natasha Romanoff, casually volunteering information about the case. She really does trust him.

Clint is slouched in a seat next to the kid. He has taken the coat and pulled it over his head, his chest rising and falling evenly, his body still. It is hard to tell if he is awake.

“How many kids were there?”

“Twelve genetically engineered fetuses, using your DNA among others. You can safely say the operation was a spectacular and embarrassing failure, considering Peter is the only one left alive. They only had twelve subjects and yet they gambled with these kids’ health like it was nothing. It doesn’t add up. Can’t put my finger on it, but—”

“Do you know how they got my DNA?”

She shrugs. “It wouldn’t be that hard to get a hold of, Tony. Swap your glass in a restaurant. Pluck some hair off your coat. Send someone after you to get you in the sack.”

Rhodey climbs out of the front seat, leaving the jet on autopilot. He grabs a hold of the metal railing overhead as his gaze drifts past them. “FRIDAY still couldn’t get a sign of life from Fury,” he says. “I decided not to contact Maria, since I don’t know if that would endanger her, too.” He moves closer to Clint, peeks under the coat.

“It might not be a bad sign,” Natasha says. “He. You know. Has his ways.”

-

It’s a little past midnight when they land. From across the dark water, the lake house glows with amber light. They follow the thin, winding ribbon of dirt road until it changes to a stone footpath. The house needs a lick of paint, Tony thinks as they approach. The wind piled leaves up against the front porch. The door to the shed is open, just as Tony left it when he went in to retrieve his suit yesterday morning.

Helen Cho is by the front door. She takes Clint by the arm when they enter and promptly commandeers the master bedroom to see to her patient. Peter burrows deeper into the large coat and hangs back when they enter, staying close to the wall, makes himself a shadow.

Pepper is making lentil soup in their largest cooking pot. The one she takes out when she’s stressed, so she can stir wildly and angrily. She lays the wooden spoon across it and steps closer to hug him.

“We’ve had dinner,” Tony says, because Harley cooked them about twenty ounces of spaghetti and served it with a jar of pickles on the side.

“Do not vex me, darling,” she warns. “Eat you soup and say ‘thank you, dear’.”

“Thank you, dear.”

She leans back, her lips pursed, her hands on his nape, one thumb rubbing his neck. “Do those hurt?”

“Huh?”

“It looks like someone tried to strangle you.”

“Oh. That.”

She looks past him, at the others. Cautious.

“I like soup,” Peter ventures, and Pepper’s expression relaxes into a smile.

-

Tony turns over his own phone, left on the table by the couch almost 48 hours ago, and sees he already has a message from Harley.

Just FYI during our gaming Peter informed me, for no particular reason, that smth like 5000 serial killers are currently active in the USA.

And, sent a few minutes later:

I like him :)

-

Peter has nothing to unpack. He drapes the large coat over the chair in the guestroom and lays the notepad and pencil on the nightstand, neatly lined up.

“Complimentary toothbrush,” Tony says.

“Yes. Okay.”

It’s a kiddie toothbrush from a package they bought for Morgan. Bright blue, with tiny dancing penguins. Peter runs his thumb across the handle, studying it for a moment. “Thank you,” he says, and goes into the bathroom.

Tony goes around the guest rooms and hands out the same toothbrush to all his other guests.

-

“And now what?” Pepper asks once Tony told her the whole story.

Tony shrugs as he swipes breadcrumbs off the table. The house is dark, only the light under the range hood is on. Upstairs is quiet. “I don’t know. We rest, and Natasha can tell us her plans in the morning.”

“Why did you leave?” she asks. “And like this? When you haven’t even suited up in five years.”

“We had Morgan. It changed things.”

“You still have Morgan, Tony,” she says. She sounds angry.

“She’s not always here. She has school now. There’s… space in my head. I suppose there’s danger in that.”

“I remember now why we broke up,” she says. She is frowning down at the wooden table, tracing the grooves in the surface with her fingers. “Because I knew you wouldn’t stop. I knew you shouldn’t stop. But I also knew how it would end. And I didn’t want to sit around and wait for you to die.”

“We’re not breaking up,” Tony says, his heart hammering in his chest. “Pepper, just believe me, please, I’m—”

“Don’t ask my forgiveness,” she says sharply. “I’ll always forgive you, so it’s a waste of time. I’ll have to learn to live with it, after all. Don’t ask me to understand it, either, because I do. I do. I could get a job, at least. That hasn’t been an option for you.”

“Maybe in five more years when people have really forgotten about me, I’ll become gainfully employed. Until then, I’m a kept man.”

“You could use a new hobby.”

“It’s not a midlife crisis.”

“It would be nice,” she says, “if you stopped deliberately putting yourself in situations where you might get killed. And if joining a book club or starting a podcast takes up some of that dangerous space in your head, I don’t care whether we call it a midlife crisis or a spiritual awakening.”

“What would my podcast be about?”

The floorboards creak. Helen steps into the kitchen. “Complete cognitive and physical rest for at least 48 hours,” she says. “He has requested to be taken back to his family in the morning.”

“Yes of course. I’m sure Rhodey is happy to fly him back first thing tomorrow. Can we offer you—?”

“I left instructions with FRIDAY. She’ll alert me if his situation changes overnight.” She clasps her bag, hoists it over her shoulder. “You should do a podcast about sports.”

“I don’t know the first thing about sports.”

“That would be the fun part,” she says.

-

Tony sleeps fitfully and slips out of bed before five AM. The kitchen is cold. It always is, because there is a constant draft coming off the window. ‘Rustic charm’, Pepper calls it. The kitchen is tucked away in the back of the house, so the window offers a view of the dark forest. In an hour or two, during twilight, you might spot a deer or even a red fox.

The door to the living room has never closed properly — rustic charm — and Tony can see a strip of faint light around the edges. He turns on the espresso machine before pushing the door open.

Their living room, with the broadloom carpet and long curtains, is a few notches warmer than the kitchen at least. Next to the fireplace they’ve never lit, Peter sits on the couch, tucked into the corner. He is still in the same shirt and cargo pants; probably slept in them. He has the blanket tucked around his shoulders.

 He glances up at Tony, then back down at the notepad he is scribbling on.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“I slept too much yesterday.” He says it frustrated, full of self-reproach.

“What are you writing about?”

“It’s not about anything.” Peter draws his knees up to shield the notepad from view.

“I won’t look.” If he did, he probably wouldn’t understand the jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols.

“I wanted to swim,” Peter says.

“It’s November.”

Peter gives him a puzzled look, like he doesn’t see how those two things are in any way related.

“You can do anything you want.”

“Or go for a run,” Peter says.

“You can go outside, you can do anything you want.”

“I know,” Peter says, voice hardening. “I don’t need your permission. You wouldn’t even be able to stop me.”

“I wouldn’t be,” Tony agrees. He doesn’t point out that Peter is the one who brought it up in the first place.

“I’ll go, then,” Peter says. He rips the page from the notebook and tucks it into his pocket.

“I’ll order clothes for you. I can get you a swimsuit. And proper running shoes.”

Peter gives him a measuring look. Then steps around him and disappears down the hallway. Tony hears the front door whine open and shut.

-

Peter is not back when Rhodey takes Clint back to the quinjet around six. Natasha sees them off and returns with a solemn face. “So,” she says, lingering in the doorway to the living room. “You expect me to have a plan, I suppose.”

Tony is scrolling through Bloomingdale’s website and adds a teenage-sized bathrobe to his cart. “Right now, the plan is pajamas.” Pajamas feels like a very manageable first step towards… towards… “Yeah, okay, what is the plan?”

“If you set me up with some equipment, I’ll see if I can somehow get in touch with Fury. Or at least find out where he is.”

“I can help.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s probably, uh—Pepper thinks I should join a book club. So.” He taps the little plus symbol to add a dozen of the same pair of socks to his cart. Peter doesn’t seem like the type of kid who particularly cares about having a wide variety of socks to choose from. “What did Clint mean by Peter being a walking blood bag?”

She purses her lips, slowly rubs her fingers together. “After the spider-poison-thing killed four other kids, they held off on experiments, but took his blood twice a week to continue the experiments extracorporeally.”

“A real step up, I suppose,” Tony says. “Fucking twice a week? Can you even survive that?”

“Healing factor.”

“Fuckers.” Tony enters his credit card details, hits send, then lays his phone aside. He looks at her. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you need. I mean that. As long as you need. But when you no longer need to… He can’t stay here, Nat.”

“Are you afraid SHIELD will—"

“No. I know they won’t find him here, that’s not… But he’s… His background…”

“You think he might pose a threat? Snap and attack us?”

“I don’t think that. I don’t think he would. I’m 99% sure he wouldn’t. And I’d take those odds on a lot of things. But not my daughter’s safety.”

“I understand,” she says. “I’ll work on it.”

-

Peter is not back when Tony goes upstairs to wake Morgan around seven. She rubs her eyes and blinks up at him for several seconds, and then suddenly squeals happily and throws her arms around his neck. “Daddy!”

“Hi, sweetheart.”

She releases him. “I want a guinea pig!” she says.

“A guinea pig.” Tony sits on the edge of her bed. “We have mice in the garden. And lady bugs.”

“Where are the mice? I never see them.”

“They’re very fast.”

“I want a guinea pig, they’re not very fast. They sit a lot.”

“Well, we have snails, too, you know.”

“Daddy!”

Tony tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I brought some visitors who are staying for a little while.”

“Uncle Rhodey?”

“No. Some people you’ve never met. Do you want to get dressed and come say hi before you’re off to school?”

“Okay.”

When they get downstairs, Peter is back, circling the kitchen. He wipes a droplet off his chin. Tony can see out the kitchen window that it has started raining; a thin, insistent drizzle.

“Morgan, this is Peter,” he says.

Morgan makes a tiny noise and hides her face against Tony’s leg. Peter gives her a look that betrays no particular emotion before his eyes drift back up at Tony. He has his arms tightly wrapped around himself. He must be cold, and he hasn’t had breakfast.

“Come on. We keep the living room warmer than the kitchen. I ordered you new clothes, but you can borrow some of my stuff. Just sit tight, I’ll get you some breakfast, too. Morgan, will you help me make some breakfast for Peter?”

Morgan pulls her face away from Tony’s leg to glance up at Peter again. “Okay,” she says.

-

Peter eats a bowl of cereal and then tucks his hands into the pockets of Tony’s sweatshirt. “The papers say it will be drastically colder next week.”

“Yikes,” Tony says. “I didn’t know we even had papers here.”

“We should probably be getting this place ready for winter.”

“Ready for—What’s… What’s wrong with it now?”

“The windows aren’t insulated. There’s dead branches. And lots of leaves clogging the gutters, probably.”

“Dead branches?”

“You have to prune the deadwood from trees now before the snow falls, because that’s when dead branches will snap off and hit you in the skull. Over 100 people are killed by falling trees or tree branches every year in the United States alone.”

“November is maybe a bit on the early side.”

“The earliest recorded snow fall in the state of New York was on September 20th.”

“All right,” Tony says.

“1956.”

“Well. Can’t be too careful. Okay. Sure. You can prune.”

Peter’s shoulders hike up to his ears. “I can do anything I want,” he says, tone shifting abruptly to something acid. “You can’t stop me.”

“True.”

After breakfast, Pepper drives Morgan to school. Tony sets Natasha up in his office to start her digging. And then he and Peter go outside to prune the deadwood from trees which is a totally normal thing to be doing with a child soldier who was put together with bits of your DNA. “I’ll get you one of those really big, long-reach pruners. We’ll still need a ladder, though, I figure.”

Peter follows him to the shed. He takes the large pruners from Tony, wrapping both arms around them, and watches as Tony wriggles the ladder away from the wall. “I can climb,” he says. “If you don’t mind. I mean, I can climb anyway, you can’t stop me.”

“Climb the tree, you mean?”

“Yes, I—It’s a thing I do.”

The tamarack trees are golden, the oak trees a fiery red. The rain has stopped but everything is damp and the tree bark is slippery. True to his word, though, Peter climbs up a first tree easily. A bit too easily; there’s probably some enhancements in there somewhere. He plants his feet in the wedges where branch meets trunk and starts cutting. “You don’t have to watch me,” he says.

“Did you go outside a lot?” Tony asks, neck craned. “Before, I mean?”

“We went outside,” Peter says.

“Climbed lots of trees?” He’s just trying to get a gage of how disconnected from society Peter grew up.

“Sure.”

“Watched TV?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you know the ketchup song?”

Peter quietly cuts away a few branches. They tumble down, bouncing back up against the layer of leaves on the ground. Just when Tony starts to wonder if he said something wrong, Peter speaks up again. “How old is your daughter?”

“Four.”

“She makes me think of Susan. Right around the time when she died.” He says it easily enough, but his head is tilted up and Tony can’t read his expression.

“There were eleven other kids, right?”

“Yeah.” Another branch pinballs down until it hits the ground. “It was just me, Susan and David until I was five. She died at four. This one killed David when we were eight.” He taps the scar on his upper arm through his sweater.

“You remember what she looked like?”

Peter leans back against a branch and looks down. “I remember,” he says. “Too much for my own good, they would tell me. I think that’s your DNA, Tony Stark.” He slings one arm around the trunk and starts climbing black down.

“I’m sorry,” Tony says.

Peter frowns at him, puzzled.

“Just—Some pretty fucked up things happened to you.”

“Self-pity disgusts me,” Peter says, and moves to the next tree.

Peter tells him two more times that he doesn’t need to watch, but eventually accepts Tony’s presence, his useless standing around, doing nothing, occasionally stepping aside to avoid getting hit by falling branches. He doesn’t mind Tony’s wheedling questions. But he glares a fierce glare when Tony at one point warns him to ‘be careful’.

Tony is learning which lines he can and cannot cross. Do not offer help, do not offer protection, do not in any way insinuate that Peter might not have things completely one hundred percent handled.

He also learns that Peter grew up in quite a regular household until he was five, with his genetically engineered siblings Susan and David. That his ‘parents’ Mary and Richard were SHIELD scientists. That he was moved into a SHIELD facility when he was five and spent the rest of his childhood there. He also learns that Peter likes carpentry, that he knows the names of all plants and animals down to the tiny bugs called ‘springtails’ which are apparently all over the trees, that he can do a dovetail joint and a halved joint, and that he in fact does know the ketchup song.

Tony cannot get Peter to actually sing it, though, no matter how much he wheedles.

They’re putting the tools away when Pepper arrives back from dropping Morgan off at school, a bag of paper groceries in her arms. “The clothes were in our PO box,” she calls out. “They’re all in the trunk, you can take them out?” She kicks the door post to rid her shoes of caked mud and disappears inside.

“The clothes are for you, kid,” Tony says.

“What?”

“You need more clothes.”

Peter takes a step away from him, crosses his arms, face clouding over. “I might just leave,” he warns. “Whenever I decide. Whenever you’re no longer useful to me. You can’t stop me.”

“You’ve made that clear.”

Peter lifts his chin and adds, in the interest of full disclosure, clearly: “And I’d just take those clothes with me.”

“Sounds good.”

-

Harley sends him another message. Is he still with you? Did you give him a phone yet? I have some hilarious memes to send him.

-

Natasha is hauled up in Tony’s office all day, and the next day, and the day after.

Peter DIYes his way through the lake house. There is no indication that he finds it socially unconventional to fix the showerhead in someone else’s house, rehang the curtains, change a light bulb. He doesn’t ask for permission. He just informs them brusquely that it needs to be taken care of or, in some cases, that it already has been.

But other than that, he hovers quietly in the margins of their household. Disappears from the house a lot. ‘Going for a run’. Or he swims up and down the lake. Or he tucks himself away in a corner of the couch and scribbles on his notepad. He becomes less careful about hiding the pieces of paper. Tony finds one folded up in the crease of the couch. It has more gibberish on it.

He shows it to Natasha when he goes into the office to bring her coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich. She holds the piece of paper up between two fingers. “I don’t know what you want me to do with it,” she says, and flings it into the trashcan.

“I just think it’s concerning.” A storm picked up this afternoon, clouds swirling in the sky, and the wind is rattling the roof. Peter still went out for a run a few minutes ago. It’s the only time Tony feels safe to talk about him, considering the kid overheard him and Natasha talking on Harley’s balcony while he was still by the stolen pizza van.

“He’s a genetic experiment who was trained for highly dangerous missions,” she says. “And he’s pruning your trees and cooking your dinner. This isn’t…” she sighs and rakes a hand through her hair, almost knocking her cup of coffee off the desk. She hasn’t made much progress in the last few days. There is an article opened on the screen in front of her, about Secretary Ross meeting with the Mexican foreign secretary. “Do you want us to leave?”

“No. That’s not—I’m just concerned.”

Peter has been cooking them dinner. He makes pizza from scratch and knows how to cut a mango without the whole kitchen ending up covered in a sticky layer of syrupy juice. He tells Morgan, quite sternly, that she needs to eat her vegetables. Tony wouldn’t exactly call him normal: he’s stand-offish and overly rational. But still. He isn’t as bad as some of his Avengers teammates. He knows the kid even has a sense of humor. It just hasn’t made another appearance since that day at Harley’s place.

“How about Fury?” he asks.

“I can’t figure it out,” she says. “I think I might… There is an option, I’ve been considering, if he had to lay low, that he went to the safehouse in Ohio and is waiting for me to get there.”

“Or,” Tony says. “Ross captured him and is torturing him for information and they know about Ohio, and you’d walk straight into a trap if you went there.”

“Crapshoot,” she says. “I still want to case the place. It’s my only—I don’t have any better ideas and I’ve been in here for three days now. I always do better in the field than behind a screen.”

“I… Nat, I can’t come with you,” Tony says. “I promised Pepper—”

“Yeah, yeah. Book club. Podcast.”

-

On Saturday, Clint turns up on their front porch, looking healthy as ever, well-rested, clean-shaven.

Tony leans his forearm against the doorpost. “I didn’t say you could just show up any time you wanted, now that you know about this place.”

“Oh, shush,” he says. “How is the kid?” The wind is still fierce, blowing leaves around his ankles and across the threshold.

“It’s good to see you. The kid’s inside, draft-proofing our windows with Pepper. Are you… staying for dinner?”

“Natasha wants to go out and find Fury. She asked me to come and stay here while she’s away.”

“You think we can’t take care of Peter by ourselves?”

Clint gives him a certain look. “Natasha said you were afraid he might snap and attack you, so someone should be here with you.”

“No—That’s not…”

Clint pushes his way inside and Tony follows.

Peter is leaning over the sink, slowly running the back of his hand along the edges of the window to test for drafts. “Corner opposite to the handle,” he says. He is wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans, and socks with polka dots, all brand new. “The hinges are the problem, we’ll have to replace them. I’ll need a Philips screwdriver.”

“I want to help!” Morgan demands. Her usual playdate on Saturday was cancelled and she’s still running around in her pajamas. Peter on the other hand, Tony is pretty sure, still sleeps with his shoes on in case he needs to make a quick getaway.

Morgan catches sight of Clint and promptly hides behind her mother’s legs.

“Clint!” Pepper says. “You look much better.”

“Bored out of my skull,” Clint says. “Hiya, kid. Still here I see?”

Peter’s mouth immediately settles into a grim line. “I can leave anytime I want, you can’t stop me.”

“I can’t,” Clint agrees. “Would be a shame, though.”

Peter looks taken aback.

-

Natasha leaves.

Tony gets a laptop and a phone from his drawer of laptops and phones and sets them up, runs some tests. Then gives them to Peter. “For you. My AI is on them,” he says. “It’s entirely secure.”

“So you can track me?” Peter asks.

“You don’t have to—”

“When I go for a run?”

“You can just leave it at home, you don’t have to carry it on you.”

Peter turns the phone over in his hands, but his eyes are on Tony’s face. He still looks wary. “I don’t have anyone to call,” he says.

“That’s not why people use phones, these days, right?” Tony says. “Either way, I put Harley’s number in there. He wants to send you memes.”

“Seriously. Who is that kid, though?” Clint asks from across the room. This morning, he took one step into Tony’s office, looked around at the mess of notes and documents Natasha left behind, and said “Nah.” He has since firmly installed himself in the armchair opposite the couch where he has spent the rest of the morning reading gardening magazines. Like he is actually just here to babysit.

Natasha had promised to be back by Monday. Tony wonders what they will all do when she isn’t.

-

“So why’d Rogers disappear?” Tony asks on Sunday morning, as they all have their breakfast on the front porch together, with the bright autumn sun on their faces.

“Buddy of his who died, turns out he hadn’t,” Clint says.

“What about Bruce?”

“Still MIA.”

“The… kid? Wanda?”

Clint smirks. “Moved in with Vision. They just got a cat together.”

“I want a cat!” Morgan pipes up.

“Thought you wanted a guinea pig?”

“Yes,” she brightens. “Can I have a guinea pig?”

“I told you, there’s snails in the garden.”

“And springtails,” Peter tells her. “We can go hunt for them, later. Animals in the wild are much more interesting than ones in cages. And you should learn about them, it’s useful.” He seems to have taken it upon himself to educate Morgan in those areas where he apparently finds Pepper and Tony’s parenting lacking. When Tony first got downstairs this morning, the two of them were going through all the cereal boxes in their kitchen, reading the nutritional labels while Peter explained to her what it all meant. Morgan absolutely loved it, like she loves every single activity she can do together with someone. Doesn’t matter if it’s going to Disney Land or reading the dictionary out loud. The latter seems a far more likely option with Peter around.

They watch from the front porch as Peter takes Morgan around the garden, rolling away large branches to find the bugs crawling through the dark earth underneath. They count the bugs, and Peter teaches Morgan their names and handles them gently, very gently, with a respect for life that Morgan emulates instantly.

“He’s….” Clint says.

“I know,” Tony says, and types out on his phone enhanced hearing btw so be cool.

“Oh,” Clint says. “Hadn’t figured that one out yet.”

Clint and Pepper go back inside but Tony stays and watches. Peter glances his way a few times. When he and Morgan head back in his direction, Peter pauses on the porch as Morgan runs inside to wash her hands. “I wouldn’t hurt her,” he says.

“I know that,” Tony says, surprised. Then realizing: “You heard Clint yapping about it, right? When he turned up on our doorstep? I didn’t ask him to come here, you know.”

“I would protect her,” Peter says.

Something unexpectedly fond unfurls in Tony’s chest. “Yeah,” he says. “Thanks, partner. For as long as you stick around, right?”

“It’s not so bad here,” Peter says. “There aren’t a lot of numbers to keep track of.”

“What numbers do you keep track of?”

“It’s just… They get lodged in my brain. And then it overheats in there, so I have to write them all down to get rid of them.”

“What numbers?’

“Everything. The coordinates of your house. The cereal has point five gram of polyunsaturated fat per serving, and one gram of soluble fiber and 180 milligrams of potassium. That sort of stuff.”

“Ah,” Tony says. “That sort of stuff.”

“Botanically speaking, a banana is a vegetable.”

“Really?”

“No,” Peter says, and the corners of his mouth twitch again.

There is a sparkle there, that SHIELD rubbed out to a dull glow. But it’ll come back.

-

I got it! Harley texts him. Tony. Start an ASMR podcast.

-

Morgan stomps her feet as she looks out across the lake. Peter is a little dot in the distance, almost on the opposite shore. “I want to swim, too!”

“You can swim unsupervised when you’re sixteen, like Peter,” Pepper says.

“Or never. Never would also be fine,” Tony mutters.

-

Natasha and Fury arrive Sunday evening in a rainstorm. They drive an unfamiliar red Toyota with a missing headlight, bouncing through the puddles, windshield wipers going full throttle.

The afternoon had been tranquil: coffee and newspapers. Peter has been drawing up a plan that has Pepper interested; to grow mushrooms in the cellar where Tony has literally not stepped foot in over a year.

Fury steps out in an army raincoat and a broadbrimmed hat and legs it towards the house, shoving past Tony without greeting. “Goddamn ass weather,” he says, dripping all over the floorboards.

“Beats getting waterboarded,” Tony says.

“Sure does.” He beats the brim of his hat against his leg and then hangs it, studies the medley of postcards on the opposite wall.

Natasha closes the door behind them.

“Looks like an easy trip,” Tony says. “Or did you kill some more rogue SHIELD agents, hotwire a few cars?”

“No,” Natasha says. “They’ve gone quiet.”

“Unfortunately,” Fury mutters. “Now we gotta flush them out.”

“They’re hiding?” Tony asks. “Why did you go off-radar, then?”

“Ross isn’t hiding,” Fury says grimly. “He’s in Mexico, but that hasn’t stopped him from sending two separate hitmen after me right as I started pulling at the wrong threads. I put Hill in charge and am supposedly abroad for business. I think it’s fair to assume that Ross and his lackeys have no fucking clue what happened to their asset. The Zodiac base blew up. Their helicopter disappeared. The agent they sent in went radio silent.”

“Come on,” Natasha says. “Inside. Coffee. No hallway conferences.”

Peter and Pepper have spent the last hours bringing mason jars out of the cellar and rinsing them out to make room for the new mushroom project. Morgan is helping by building a tower out of jars on the floor tiles.

“Hey, kid,” Natasha tells Peter, brushing the back of her hand against his shoulder. She actually gets a smile in response. That smile slips to something darker when Peter spots Fury.

Fury’s gaze roams over the collection of jars and then lands on Peter’s face. “Looking hostile there, kid,” he says. “Heard about me, probably? Nothing too favorable, probably?”

“I was told you were in charge,” Peter says, stand-offish.

“That’s what I was told, too,” Fury says. “But guess what, some fuckwits drew their own plans.” He grabs a tangerine from the fruit basket without asking and starts peeling.

“So you’re saying you lost control over your own organization?” Peter asks in a voice smooth as steel.

“Yes. I’m taking control back. No offense, but getting you out was only a minor step in one hell of a masterplan.”

“Good to know there’s a masterplan.”

“You’re pretty opinionated for a brainwashed genetic experiment,” Fury says. “I like it.

“Your approval means nothing to me.”

Fury gives a wolfish grin.

“Morgan, go play upstairs,” Pepper says. Tony is surprised she doesn’t take Morgan out of the room herself. Pepper never had any interest in getting involved with Avenger business before, no; actively walled herself off from it. But for this, apparently, she wants to stay.

Clint makes coffee. He knows his way around by now.

“I need information,” Fury says.

“I bet,” Peter says.

“Let’s start with the two geneticists you lived with until you were five. Do you know their names?”

“I know all the names.”

“Are you going to tell us?” Fury asks, with an expression like he’s expecting defiance.

“Get me a pen,” Peter says.

He sits at the table with a pen and a blank sheet of paper, and writes down the names of seven members of the security team, then eight geneticists in pairs of two, and below each pair three more names. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard Parker are together, with Peter 14q07, Susan 14q08, David 14q09. “These were the nuclear families until we were five and all moved to the facility,” Peter says. And then he explains the ins and outs of the facility’s security, writes down the exact coordinates of the facility, scribbles down the home router IP address, and draws a rough map, marking where all the cameras are. “I don’t know any security codes,” he says apologetically. “Oh. Ray is dead, by the way.” He puts an asterisk by the name of one of the security guards.

“So are two others,” Natasha said. “Shot them. A red-haired man with a short beard. A woman with a sharp jaw and short curly hair.”

“That’s Amy,” Peter says. He frowns as he marks another name with an asterisk. “But the man… No one had red hair. Are you sure?”

“The team may have been bigger than you realized.”

“Hm.” Peter looks dissatisfied.

“These two,” Fury says, tapping his finger against two of the children’s names. A ‘James’ and a ‘Hazel’. “The files we found said they died as well, but unlike with the other kids, it didn’t mention how.”

“Because they didn’t die during treatment,” Peter says. He draws lines from each name and starts detailing, dry and detailed, how every single child died. “They stopped the treatments when we were the only three left. These two died much later, on missions. James was too careful. Hazel was... When we younger, she’d catch spiders and pull out their legs. She didn’t pass any of the psych evals. I think they just sent her on a suicide mission to be rid of her.”

Tony squints to make out Peter’s handwriting. The arrow by Susan now says ‘Na3KPO4 induced cardiac arrest, age: 4’. Four other kids, including David, all ‘Tritium hanatoxin induced anaphylactic shock, age: 8’.

“Secretary Ross,” Fury says. “Did you ever actually meet him?”

“No. Never heard his name. But I knew there were people… upstairs.”

“He knows how to be invisible. But I want to rip this thing out branch, root, and stem. And Ross is the root.”

“I thought you knew for a fact he was bankrolling this?” Tony says. “Doesn’t that mean you have evidence already?”

“We do,” Natasha says. “But we didn’t exactly obtain those files through legal channels. A court would throw them out. Let me remind everyone of what we’re trying to do here: we want to put a secretary of state behind bars. Unless the evidence is absolutely airtight, he’ll walk free and we’ll probably be the ones suffering the consequences. We can’t rush this thing.  We need to strike at the opportune time. Infiltrate the facility and get Ross at the same time. If we overplay our hand, Ross will cover his tracks even more than he already has.”

“It’s going to be a bitch planning that all out,” Clint points out.

“Let’s talk about your part in this, kid,” Fury says, his eye flicking back up at Peter.

“If you’re thinking about actually involving him, think again,” Pepper says. “And then think a third time. I understand that you need to operate outside the law. That doesn’t mean we throw all our principles out the window. Peter is sixteen.” This is why she insisted on staying, clearly.

Peter burrows his hands deeper into the pockets of his sweater. His mouth is set into a grim line. But. He doesn’t contradict her. Tony knows Peter as someone fierce, gritty, someone who doesn’t like to be put on the sidelines. But maybe Pepper has seen something else.

“I have no desire to put him in the field,” Fury says. “I put valuable time, effort, resources into getting him out in the first place, I don’t want to see it wasted. No, my question is,” his gaze on Peter sharpens, “can I count on you to stay out of it? Or are you going to try to get involved? Exact your pound of flesh?”

Peter slides the sheet of paper his way. “This isn’t my mess,” he says. “So, great, good luck. I’ll give you any information you need, but I don’t want—I’d like to never see another dead body in my life, thank you.” He looks away, jaw set.

Fury gives a brusque nod. “Good. I don’t want to involve Hill, either. If Ross gets a whiff that she knows more than she should, he’ll send hitmen after her, too, and I need her to run the ship while I’m gone. I think we’ll have to approach and recruit a handful of agents who I know are loyal to me personally. Cloak-and-dagger. We trust the wrong person; we’re back to square one.”

“This is going to take some time,” Natasha says.

“You can crash in our bedrooms any time,” Tony says. “Thursday is thanksgiving, we’ll have a blast. Other than that, I can’t be of any help here. I’ll be busy. I’m joining a book club, you know.”

“Oh,” Peter says. “Harley told me you were going to do an ASMR podcast.” He has that look on his face that, Tony has learned, means he is amused.

-

“You’re a sensible one, Peter,” Pepper says later, when the three of them sit on the front porch. “God knows it’s been a lengthy struggle for Tony to actually stay out of dangerous missions.”

Morgan has gone to bed and the conspirators are still conspiring in the kitchen.

“I didn’t mind donating blood twice a week,” Peter says. He sits on the porch swing, one arm wrapped around the chain, and leans his head back. “It didn’t even hurt. We had school, and they took our blood, and they let us read books and play sports and go outside. I spent half my time rescuing bugs from Hazel. And then they started giving us firearm training, and teaching us how to—how to choke people or snap people's necks. And Hazel really liked it. Really liked it. And I knew if she liked something, it was bad news. I can shoot a guy—”

“You didn’t donate blood, by the way,” Tony says.

“—but I’d rather just spend my days making pizza and carrying mason jars around,” Peter continues. “And never touch a gun again. But life is not about being happy. It’s about being useful.”

Pepper nudges his knee with her foot. “That’s not true, Peter. How you feel matters. What do you want from life?”

“People never ask trees about their plans for the day. All day have to do is exist, and they fulfill their purpose. I wish it was like that for people.”

They look out across the expanse of the lake, at the distant foothills, the sky scattered over with grey clouds. The rain has stopped but the trees are still dripping.

“I’d like to be a carpenter,” Peter says.

Chapter Text

Thursday is thanksgiving. The rain drums down relentlessly. The trees are bent back under the wind. Natasha barges inside, muttering low curses, and Russian words that are probably also curses, her jacket pulled over her head. Even the short track from the shed to the house has her soaked.

The shed that Tony used as his workshop has been repurposed into a battle station. Tony and Pepper are happy to provide shelter, but they don’t want to have to constantly sidle past strategy meetings at their own kitchen table. It’s just Natasha and Fury in there right now. Clint went back home yesterday to be with his family for the holidays.

Peter readily replies to any questions they ask him, but gives that shed a wide berth. He goes for runs. He swims. Last Tuesday, he fixed the wobbly wooden balustrade on their porch. On Wednesday, he cleared all the leaves out of the gutter. And on days like these, he potters around in the cellar with Pepper, moving around large trays and hay and pieces of wood and compost and old newspapers.

“I could use some help in the kitchen,” Tony yells down the stairs. “I got a whole vegan three-course thanksgiving dinner to prepare.” Morgan already made things difficult by taking her felt pens and drawing on the cauliflower.

“But. Portabella mushrooms!” Pepper says in defense. “And going vegan was your suggestion.”

“Because my body is a temple!”

“Alcohol fatalities increase two to three times during thanksgiving,” Peter says.

“Yeah? How many people choke to death on turkeys?”

A short silence. “I have no statistics for that,” Peter says.

“Between ten and twenty people in the US each thanksgiving,” FRIDAY puts in. “People aged 55-74 are at the highest risk.”

Tony kicks the door. “You’re all useless.”

“I’ll help,” Natasha says, shaking the rain out of her hair.

She slices up the potatoes and cherry tomatoes, rubs them down with salt and pepper. She doesn’t say anything about what she and Fury have been discussing, and Tony pretends he doesn’t want to know. He thinks about what Peter said, though he doesn’t entirely remember it. Something poetic about trees.

Peter comes upstairs eventually and washes his hands, shakes them dry. “Let me,” he says, and takes the mortar and pestle from him to grind the chickpeas.

The kid is comfortable here. It’s good, but at the same time it’s bad, because he can’t stay.

-

New people move in next door to Harley’s place. He sends Tony a picture of the moving truck parked diagonally across the road

“Looks like a normal family, at least,” Tony says, bending closer to the screen of his laptop to study the picture. “Little kids.”

“That means nothing,” Peter says as he scribbles numbers and letters on his notepad. “Until I was five, I seemed like a normal family with small kids, too. Mary was mommy, Richard was daddy and me and David and Susan were the cute triplets. We jumped rope in the garden and went to the playground down the street, and to church for Christmas and Easter.”

“Point taken,” Tony says, and starts his background check. “Did you even look alike enough to be believable as triplets?”

Peter stops writing and stares at him.

Right. They were all created from the same mixture of DNA. “Stupid question.” There are two interesting facts about Mary Fitzgerald and Richard Parker, Tony learned once FRIDAY had done the full background check. One: around two decades ago, they attended several of the same conferences Tony did. “Did I sleep with her?” Tony asked when FRIDAY told him, squinting at Mary’s picture. He doesn’t remember, but he doesn’t remember a lot.

“I don’t have the information to either confirm or deny,” FRIDAY said.

Two: Mary and Richard have been legally dead for eleven years. Their private plane supposedly crashed over the gulf of Mexico, when in reality they went off grid and moved into the facility with ‘their kids’.

Tony finds himself wondering if the two felt, perhaps, a modicum of compassion for the children they had raised. “Were any of these doctors nice to you?” he asks Peter.

A shrug. “They all acted nice. But they were badly organized. And they didn’t like it when I pointed that out to them.”

Tony gives a wry smile. “I bet they didn’t.”

“Especially once there were only three of us left and they started training us for missions. I kept telling them it was a waste of valuable resources. Any moron with half a brain could do the math. When you have only three assets left, why risk their safety? But no, they had to have it done their way, and look where it got us.”

Tony has to suppress a chuckle this time. He can perfectly imagine a younger but equally fierce and opinionated Peter Parker telling the people who were literally experimenting on him how they should be doing their jobs.

“The security people were all scum, though,” Peter murmurs. “One gave Hazel a concussion, and then I gave him a concussion. And then Richard took me aside later and said I had to stop protecting the others and only look out for myself. That’s when I knew the doctors were scum too. They just hid it better.”

Tony doesn’t feel like chuckling anymore.

-

The mornings are dawning clearer and colder as they get closer to Christmas. The lake is still and smooth like a mirror. Peter tries to skip rocks a few times. It’s the first time Tony sees the kid attempt a skill and fail.

“Try a lower angle,” he suggests.

Peter tries a lower angle. The stone skips once before sinking down.

“Better,” Tony says.

“You should start a podcast about it,” Peter says. The corners of his mouth twitch.

Tony shakes his head. “These podcasts, kid, I don’t know… Remember what you said? How life is about being useful?”

“I remember everything everyone ever said.”

“Oh yeah?” Tony is distracted from his previous train of thought. “What’s the first thing I ever said to you?”

“You asked if I had elephant ears, you said I was paranoid, and you called me a malfunctioning android.”

“Huh,” Tony says. “I guess in your case first impressions really do last a lifetime. Sorry. I was under a bit of stress.”

“Yeah. Same.”

-

They find a good Christmas tree, about a mile into the forest. Not too tall. Peter saws it down. He is wearing borrowed gloves and a borrowed scarf, because Tony forgot to order those for him. The wind cuts through their clothes, knife sharp. “Can’t believe you still went swimming this morning,” Tony says, hopping from one leg to the other. Morgan no longer complained that Peter was allowed to swim on his own while she wasn’t: she dipped one toe into the water the other day, shrieked, and then hopped back to the porch to put her shoe back on.

“Cold water helps to boost the body's white blood cell count.”

The tree goes down. They both grab a branch near the bottom and lug it back towards the house.

“Have you ever celebrated Christmas?” Tony asks.

“We’d go ice skating. We didn’t have any decoration indoors, but I remember Mary and Richard hanging lights from the garden fence and putting a wreath on the door. Outward appearances. And we went to church. We didn’t do presents.”

They pause so Tony can adjust his grip on the tree. “We don’t do presents, either, because Morgan’s birthday is early January. We do presents then. When’s your birthday?”

Peter lets out a sound behind the scarf that might be a huffed laugh. “I was transferred from the human tubal fluid to an incubator on the first of August,” he says. “I suppose that’s as close as I ever got to the average human childbirth.”

“Okay. First of August.”

They get home and pull the tree into their living room where they set it up in front of their mothballed fireplace.

The next day, Peter cuts stars out of wood with a handsaw and shows Morgan how to smoothen the edges with sandpaper. They use ribbons to hang the stars from the tree branches. Morgan hums ‘jingle bells’.

“Hey. I know that one,” Peter says.

-

Fury disappears for a few days, and then when he comes back Natasha disappears for a few days. Clint walks in and out, traveling back and forth between New York and his own family so much that Tony suspects he spends more time on the road than in any one place.

Tony still pretends to not be interested, nope, not even a little bit. He researches topics for podcasts instead, and finds all suggestions equally lame. It seems like everything has already been done, from dental hacks to vlogging zombies, and he wants to be useful. He wants to offer the world something new.

Peter was right. He wishes he could be like a tree. Fulfill his purpose, just by being.

-

Happy New Year, Harley texts him. How’s our government. Still falling apart?

-

Winter, the real winter, arrives all at once. The rain freezes as it falls. The tamarack trees lose their needles. The ice bites into the soil. Some days, flurries of snow clump up in the windowpanes. Even Peter doesn’t go swimming anymore. He still goes for runs every morning, and goes into the cellar every day to ‘mist the portobellos’, and sweeps the snow off the front porch, and clears a path to the shed every day, and cleans out their entire pantry.

Tony waits for Peter to go on another run before addressing the issue with Pepper. “Should I say something about it? I know he likes to keep busy, but he really doesn’t need to be cleaning our whole house.”

“Say that,” she says, and shrugs. She continues to be very unbothered by her uninvited house guests in a way that surprises Tony.

When Peter gets back, Tony tells him: “I know you like to keep busy, but you really don’t need to be cleaning our whole house.”

“We gotta drain and store your hoses, and winterize your spigots,” Peter says.

“Yeah, okay. I’m just saying you don’t have to.”

And Peter doesn’t say I can do whatever I want, you can’t stop me, I’m only staying for as long as you’re useful to me.

Peter just nods.

On one of those days when he’s around again, Clint ropes Morgan and Peter into building a snowman with him. The muffled silence of a snow-laden forest makes Clint’s booming laugh sound even louder. Tony can hear it at intervals, even from the living room. The snowman ends up about eight feet tall and Clint gives Peter a piggy-back so he can stick the carrot in the face.

Peter is smiling.

Clint knows how to treat the kid like an actual kid, Tony realizes. He should try doing that too, sometimes.

-

Things seem so easy until they don’t.

Peter is napping on the couch, with peaceful breathing and an open, relaxed expression. Pepper took one of their throw blankets and tucked it around him. They used the first yield of portobellos in a risotto this evening. Pepper and Peter were chuckling about inside jokes as they sliced up their harvest. The whole evening felt familiar; mellow.

Tony sits in the armchair and glances across, and gets a feeling he can’t shake.

It keeps him up that night.

First of August.

Where will Peter be on his next birthday? Where does a kid like Peter end up? When Fury has SHIELD back under control he might get the kid a safe house in Ohio or some other flyover state. Will he be all on his own, or are there foster parents for child soldiers? And then, what, SHIELD is going to pay for him to go to carpenter school? Is there even such a thing as carpenter school? He’ll have to ask FRIDAY in the morning. Or is SHIELD just going to wait until he’s in his twenties and then quietly recruit him back onto the force, this time legally?

He falls asleep late and wakes up late. He can hear Pepper in Morgan’s room, attempting to convince her to get up. He shrugs into his bathrobe, sticks his feet in fuzzy slippers that are flat and worn at the heels, and goes downstairs.

The table is set. Tony pauses next to it, tapping his fingers against the corner. Peter turns off the stove. He turns, a steaming plate in his hand. There is a soft smile on his face. “I made breakfast. Pancake day.”

He looks so at home in the kitchen, so much like he belongs, and it suddenly breaks Tony’s heart. “I—You can’t stay here forever, Pete.”

The smile slides off Peter’s face. He sets the plate down with too much force. “Fuck you,” he says. “Fuck you, Tony Stark, I know that. You don’t have to keep saying it. I was just doing a, a thing. You think I’m trying to bribe you with some fucking pancakes?” He turns back around and grabs the skillet, running it under the tap. It sizzles angrily, steam rises. Peter’s shoulders are hiked up to his ears.

“Sorry,” Tony says. “I just wanted—Didn’t want there to be any… confusion.”

“There’s no confusion,” Peter snaps, and he starts scrubbing the pan.

“Okay,” Tony says. “The pancakes smell really good.”

“They’re vegan.”

“Oh, great.”

Pepper and Morgan’s footsteps clatter down the stairs and seconds later, the kitchen is full of noise. Peter smiles a smile that could be mistaken for genuine, and doesn’t look at Tony the rest of the morning.

“Come on,” Tony tells him after lunch. “I’m going to teach you to skip stones.”

Peter says, after a pause, “It’s cold.”

“As if that ever stopped you before.”

Peter puts on his coat, and the gloves and scarf he had picked out; painstakingly scrolling through the online store app until he found a scarf that had tiny dancing penguins on it, just like his toothbrush. He walks ahead of Tony to the shore of the lake, where the shallows are frozen, his breath puffing in the air. “We should wait for the lake to just freeze over,” Peter says. “Watch how easily I’ll skip stones then.” The corners of his mouth twitch again.

“Cheat.”

Peter finds a smooth stone and rubs it between his fingers. “It takes approximately 20 hours to become competent in a new skill.”

“We got all the time we need, kiddo.”

He can see in Peter’s eyes that the kid takes it for the apology it is.

It doesn’t feel good enough.

-

“We’re doing it,” Natasha announces. “Leaving this Wednesday. We’ll be gone for maybe a week.”

“You’re raiding the facility?”

“We brought together a good team. Mapped out the entire area. We can wait around for Ross to make a mistake and show his hand, but we’ve been doing that for months now. It’s time the mountain went to Mohammed. We’re hoping to force his hand. Or, perhaps, to arrest some scientists willing to snitch on him in exchange for a reduced sentence.”

“All right. Well, I’ll be staying out of it.”

She smiles a knowing smile. “How’s your podcast?”

“Swell.”

-

Harley visits while they are gone, because there is finally a spare bedroom available. He arrives Friday evening with a duffel bag that only holds clothes.

“Don’t you have homework to do, as well?” Tony asks pointedly.

“I have it all sorted. I’m very organized, you know.”

“You have never been organized.”

“I am so organized. Look at me. My outfit is color-coordinated and everything. Where’s, uh… Your mysterious new ward?”

“He’s—inspecting the roof.”

“Of course he is. How long is he staying?” Harley dumps his bag on a chair and immediately turns on the electric water boiler.

“I’m not sure. Until things are fixed.”

“And then what happens to him?”

“Only time will tell.”

“Right. Thanks, magic 8-ball.” Harley starts rummaging around the kitchen cupboard.

“The teabags are in the spice rack.”

Harley frowns and snatches them up. “Why?”

“Peter says they’re a spice.”

“They are a spice,” Peter says from the doorway.

“Come on, you two,” Harley says. He sets out cups and pours tea and gets some clingfilm-wrapped banana bread from his bag – “courtesy of my mom”. They talk about Fury and Natasha and Clint on their big mission, about Peter reorganizing and re-reorganizing the kitchen a total of three times since his arrival here.

“You both need a hobby,” Harley says. “This is outrageous.”

Tony smirks. “Any suggestions?”

“Build suits. It makes you happy. I can’t believe I need to explain this.”

“I promised to stay out of all the…” he twirls his fingers around.

“Yeah, maybe don’t go on suicide missions. But you can build stuff. Is anyone going to object to you building stuff? I thought you were just a consultant anyways, you were always salty about that.”

“I wasn’t—"

“Him, I don’t know,” Harley says, raising his mug in Peter’s direction. “Haven’t really got this one pegged yet. When were you born?”

“The first of August,” Peter says, leaving out the part about the human tubal fluid.

“So you’re a Leo.”

“Actually, due to gravitational effects from the sun, the star sky has shifted since the ancient Babylonians established the zodiac signs, so the signs don’t actually match to the traditional dates everyone learns about.”

“Let’s leave science out of this, please,” Harley says. “Leos are creative. You might like a bit of photography. Maybe fashion. I’ll pierce your ears if you want.”

“Don’t even think about it, Harley,” Tony warns.

“Who are you, his dad?”

“For all intents and purposes.”

“I pierced my ears once,” Peter says. “In Mexico. It healed over instantly.”

“Why did you pierce your ears in Mexico?”

“Everyone else did it. Isa showed me how to do it.”

Tony forgets, sometimes, how this kid speed-ran through all his self-discovery while he was a hostage in a foreign country. “Please pay no mind to whatever Harley decides to tell you this weekend.” Harley is seventeen next month. Peter suddenly looks young and impressionable in comparison.

“I always pay no mind to what Harley tells me,” Peter says, the corners of his mouth twitching. “And I have a hobby. I’m building a compost pile.”

“I’m gonna download candy crush for you,” Harley tells him. “So you can spend the whole day on your phone, like a normal teenager.” He waggles his fingers. “Your phone. Fork it over.”

They all joke about it, but on Sunday after Harley leaves, Peter plays candy crush on his phone all evening and Tony talks to Pepper about being a consultant. “It would fill up that space in my mind, you see.”

“Or is it a first step to getting more involved?” she asks. “And then more, and then more? And before we know it, you’re flying out again?”

“No. Think of it as exposure therapy.”

“That would be unhelpful,” she says. “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”

“If I do something useful in small dosages, I won’t get the urge to do something stupid in juggernaut amounts.”

“I’ll think of it as immunotherapy where you build up tolerance until you’ve reached full immunity to juggernaut stupidity.” She says it with the warmth of a smile in her voice. “I’m somehow proud of you and exasperated at the same time.”

“That’s my sweet spot.”

-

Tony wakes up one morning and, through a gap in the curtains, notices the car parked by the shed door and the lights on inside.

“FRIDAY?”

“They returned around 4 AM, boss.”

“Anyone injured? Are they currently awake?”

“Scrapes and bruises. And yes.”

The dawn is cold and foggy. Tony grabs a banana on his way out. He kicks the tires of the car, then pushes his way into the shed, sliding a wedge under the door with his foot. All three of the musketeers are there, still in various stages of unholstering, cleaning and storing their weapons. He used to spend whole days in his workshop, but he has barely stepped foot in here since November. Everything is still more or less in place. “Good to see you didn’t cramp my style,” he says approvingly.

“If you’re not bringing coffee,” Fury says, “what are you doing here?”

“You remember this is my house, right?”

Fury throws his legs up like he always used to do; barge into Tony’s office, sit in his desk chair and put his dirty shoes all over the desk. Like a dog peeing on every streetcorner. “What’s your point?”

Tony very maturely flips him the bird, then takes a seat at the table and starts peeling the banana, trying his best to look like he does this every day. “What’s the latest?”

“Seriously,” Natasha says. “Thought you wanted to stay far away from this?”

It is not the sort of thing Tony is good at. Depending on other people to get what he wants. Please, oh, please, can I be part of your super-secret boyband again? “I could be a consultant,” he says brusquely. “Talked it over with Pepper. I want to give it a shot. One time offer, take it or leave it.” He turns to chuck the banana peel in a nearby trashcan, so he doesn’t have to see the look being passed between the others.

“What would you need?” Fury asks.

“What?”

“What would you need to support us in this case? SHIELD security codes, the workshop back to yourself, more equipment?”

“That easy? I expected some hard-nosed questions at least. On account of lingering resentments.”

“That would be stupid,” Fury says. “We’re not in high school, braiding hair and passing love notes.”

“Who braided your hair in high school?”

“We need all the help we can get and yours is valuable.”

“Catch me up to speed,” Tony says. “And those security codes would be useful.”

“We want to talk to Peter when he’s up,” Clint says. “There were… quite some developments. But our suggestion is, we do not tell Peter about this part,” and he slides a file Tony’s way.

-

What they do tell Peter is this:

Fury had assembled a team of eight men in total. They had carefully approached the facility from the southeast, as Peter himself had suggested. When attempting to disable the security, they had found the systems strangely already offline.

They had wandered into a deserted facility. Computers smashed to pieces. Scraps of paper found in a cold pile of ash in the fire pit out back. The bodies of eight geneticists, buried near the electric fence.

“Oh,” Peter says.

“Ross, covering his tracks. In a hurry,” Fury says. “And sloppily. We have managed to retrieve some scraps of information, and scraps are valuable. But nothing so far that can actually put him behind bars. If there is anything you can think of, anything at all…”

“Give me a moment to think about it,” Peter says. “If you’ll excuse me.”

He pushes his chair back.

Tony gives him a few minutes’ head start before following him outside. He finds Peter standing by his ditch, ax leaning on his shoulder. The kid has spent the last few days digging it, very neatly, three by three. And then drove stakes into the soil every half-foot until the whole square was sectioned off. Tony already forgot… “Remind me what this is going to be? Chicken coop?”

“Compost pile,” Peter says in clipped tones. “Do you want chickens? I can build a chicken coop next.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. I mean, I’m annoyed. I wish I knew more. More useful things.”

“Annoyed,” Tony says.

“Yeah.”

“Mary and Richard are dead, too.”

“Apparently.”

“They were your parents in a way, right?”

“Yes. I suppose. I see your point. In the beginning I loved them, I think. But that particular emotion has since been recalibrated. It is what it is.”

“Just, it would be understandable if you—"

“Self-pity disgusts me,” Peter says, and splits a wooden stalk with the ax.

-

Tony spends most of the following days in the shed. He walks over every morning when the air still feels damp, the fog is still heavy over the lake, the ground steaming gently as the feeble sun draws the dew from the grass.

It feels—He’s not going to lie. It feels good to work side by side with Clint and Natasha, even Fury. They were a team once, but it hadn’t felt like this; Tony doesn’t remember it feeling like this. He mostly remembers locking himself into his workshop, bickering when they prepared for missions, bickering during missions, and then perhaps a few fleeting moments of comradery when they had successfully foiled another plot to take over the world.

It hadn’t been like this, spending entire days pouring over the same documents, leaving the same ring-shaped coffee stains on them, firing ideas back and forth, finding satellite images and working on 3D reconstructions. Working together.

They only go back inside for dinner. Often, Peter cooks, and when Morgan pushes her vegetables around he chastizes her.

They make long days, morning until evening. But they aren’t finding the information they urgently need to find.

It’s when he and Natasha are leaning against the hood of her car one cold February evening, sipping beer, when she suggests: “Maybe we should tell the kid everything.”

“No.”

“If these suspicions are correct—"

“He doesn’t know anything that can help us,” Tony snaps. “If he did, he’d have already told us. Telling him about this won’t change that.”

“It might trigger different details. Tony, the sooner we got this solved, the sooner that kid is out of your hair.”

“He’s not in my hair.”

She taps her nails against the glass bottle. “I want to put a hypothesis to you, Stark. A notion about what’s going on here. May I?”

“I’d rather you don’t.”

“You care about him.”

“Fuck off, Romanoff, we all care about him,” Tony snaps back.

“Don’t get angry. It’s not a weakness, Tony. It’s a strength. One you shouldn’t be so hellbent on hiding from us.”

-

Spring arrives more cautiously than winter had. The witch hazel flowers. There are a few timidly sunny days, sprinkled through march, few and far between. It isn’t much.

It’s enough for Peter to take up swimming again. And start painting the entire exterior of the house. And he talks about fertilizing the flower beds and building a beehive, or a treehouse for Morgan. They’ve been eating portobellos in droves, and Pepper suggests over breakfast one morning to start growing oyster mushrooms as well.

“There isn’t much room left,” Tony says, though he hasn’t very often deigned to actually go down to the cellar; the only room in the house that lacks a direct connection to FRIDAY. Even their bathrooms have waterproof touchpads built into the wall.

“I’ll hang shelves,” Peter says. “After swimming.”

Tony feels embarrassed about not thinking of it himself. “I’ll hang them.” Clint went home for a few days. Natasha and Fury drove back to New York earlier this morning for a cloak-and-dagger rendez-vous with Hill. He’s got time.

Peter shrugs and smiles at Pepper. “Someone will hang shelves.”

“Can we go find more bugs?” Morgan asks Peter. She has a day off.

“When I’m done swimming. We might find some ladybugs, I think. And the, the cara de niño…. Baby face bugs.”

“Baby face bugs?”

“I forget the English name. A type of cricket.”

Tony leans back in his seat, smiling. “You, forgetting something?” He realizes, suddenly, thoroughly, as he says it, that he hasn’t seen Peter scribble on his notepad in at least a month.

After breakfast, Pepper leaves for work. Tony gets Morgan set up in the living room with discarded printer paper and crayons, and goes into the cellar with his hammer drill. There are rows of mushroom trays lined up against the walls. Tony carefully slides one to the side with his foot and raps his knuckles against the wall. Concrete. Not easy to drill through. Dusty, loud and physically exhausting. But he sets to work, measuring and marking the spots. The vibrations make his teeth chatter together when he starts drilling, and he clenches his jaw.

He's on his fifth hole when he suddenly pauses, hearing something out of place. Muffled, from upstairs, but louder and louder. A noise like a siren. And FRIDAY’s voice booming. “TONY STARK. TONY STARK. TONY STARK.”

The drill clatters down, squashing portobello mushrooms. Tony takes the stairs two at a time.

He bangs the door open, and the siren immediately drops away: “Morgan went into the water.” FRIDAY says, politely, horrifyingly politely, and there suddenly is no air in the room, terror seizes his heart. “You weren’t responding to my calls.” FRIDAY adds. Tony bolts to the door, trips down the wooden steps of the front porch. “Morgan!” He spots her, with another surge of panic, already about a hundred feet away from the shoreline. Swimming, swimming—she’s swimming at least. Not sinking, not floating, face down, bobbing, fuck…

“Morgan!” He rushes into the water.

Far in the distance is the tiny black spot that is Peter, almost on the opposite shore. And Morgan isn’t looking back, only looking ahead, towards her new big brother who teaches her about bugs and vegetables. She’s actually trying to swim across the lake. Tony claws at the water, trying to go faster, faster, there is a roaring in his ears.

It simultaneously feels like an eternity passes and no time passes at all before he reaches her. “Morgan!” He grabs her arm and pulls her closer. “Goddam— Come here, come here.”

“Daddy, no! I’m swimming!”

“SHUT UP!” he yells in her face.

She goes still, shocked, her breath hitches and then she bursts into tears, face scrunched up. Water splashes into her open mouth and she starts spluttering and couching, and Tony lets out a litany of swearwords as he books it back to the shoreline. His legs touch ground and he wades forward with his daughter under his arm, almost falling over, shoes squelching through mud, water pouring from his clothes. Morgan is hiccupping and bawling.

He carries her—drags her, inside, upstairs, into the bathroom. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, Morgan. How many times have I told you?” His hands shake as he rips a towel from the top of the pile.

“You yelled at meeeee!” she sobs.

Tony dries her hair with furious motions. “You can’t fu— can’t swim across the godda— across the lake. You’ll get tired, or a leg cramp, and there is no one to help you! You could die, you could die, Morgan, do you understand me?” He is still shouting. This isn’t good parenting, a tiny voice in the back of his head reminds him. It’s himself he’s really angry it.

“You s-said bad words! Lots of mommy-words!”

He leans down to be at eye level with her. “Morgan. The lake is fun, but also dangerous. I explained this to you a million times!” His voice rises in volume again, he can’t help himself.

She sniffles; shakes in her wet clothes. She didn’t even take her shoes off before diving in. Tony reaches out and pulls her close, as tightly as possible. Her heart is pounding as fast as his.

You know. You look away for half a minute and it’s too late. That kind of story.

The door creaks.

Peter is just outside the doorway. He is still in his swimming trunks; just hastily wrapped a towel around his shoulders. His face is drained of color. He no doubt heard every word of shouting Tony did, all the way from across the lake. His eyes drift from Morgan to Tony. He looks haunted. “I’m—I’m sorry.”

“Not on you,” Tony says immediately. He hoists Morgan up into his arms so he can step closer to Peter and pull him closer, too.

-

Pepper finds them huddled together on the couch under a pile of blankets, watching a nature documentary about the migration of birds. Morgan’s face is pressed against his shoulder, Peter’s arm curled around his knee.

Tony doesn’t tell her what exactly happened until they are in bed that evening, by which time the dense pit of shame and guilt in his gut has not eased.

“Tony,” she murmurs. “Every parent has times where tragedy could have struck because they were distracted for a few seconds. Every parent has moments where they think, I lost sight for a minute, but phew, nothing happened. Because that’s how it goes, a million minus one out of a million times. And that one disaster can strike anywhere. Has nothing to do with your capabilities as a parent.”

“Yeah,” Tony breathes. They look at each other across the landscape of pillows and duvet. “It doesn’t seem like you mind having him around,” Tony then murmurs. “Peter. I thought you would. He has violence in his past.”

“So do Clint and Natasha,” she says. “So do you. But I can see the determination to get it right. You know, people like you, you’re terrifying when you’re bad. But when you’re good, there’s no one better.”

-

The nightmare comes as no surprise that night. Tony wakes in cold sweat, feeling ready to throw up. It’s a little past five. He can get away with calling it ‘morning’ and getting up. He rinses his hands in the bathroom sink, presses them against his face.

He gets downstairs and Peter is at the kitchen table, picking a sticker off a tangerine, face drawn into hard lines.

“Rough night?” Tony asks.

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

“Why?” There is something vulnerable in Peter’s tone. Like he’s giving something away about himself by asking.

“Morgan. You?” Peter probably has enough nightmare material to last him a lifetime.

“Same.”

“Hm,” Tony acknowledges, and settles his hand on the nape of Peter's neck.

“It’s not supposed to happen with little kids. But it happens.”

“Yeah.” He pulls up a chair.

“You know, some of the kids they, they always had issues, medical stuff. One died as a baby because of a heart thing. Susan had an immune system defect from the start. A kid from another group had the same thing. When they were four, SHIELD did IV therapy with newly synthesized electrolytes, and it sent her into cardiac arrest. I read it later in the file. Some of the doctors objected to the treatment. Said it would likely kill them. The people upstairs pushed for it, anyway. The other kid survived, though. Until this one.” He taps his upper arm again. The scar that is a physical mark of his grief.

“You all deserved better,” Tony says. “You deserved to be safe and healthy and loved.”

Peter’s eyes are shadowed. “I don’t understand why they didn’t stop,” he whispers. “When the first kids died. All that money they invested, they must have— But they just kept going. And now everyone is just dead, everyone, and for what?”

Tony gently pulls him forward, Peter’s head tipping against his chest. He wraps one arm around tense muscles, but then Peter sinks into him, heavily, like he’s passing the weight of the entire world on to Tony, and it’s all right because Tony can carry it for him. “I am not going to let anything happen to you.” It’s one of the things he has wanted to say for a long time but never quite dared, because Peter always hated promises of help, support, protection.

Peter doesn’t huff, bristle, sneer. He just says, resigned, “you might not always get a say in it, you know.”

-

Natasha and Fury return from New York the next day with grim faces. Tony gets a sense of foreboding.

“We made our decision, Stark,” Fury says. “We’re going to run it by the kid. The whole story.”

Tony knows he can’t stop them. “Screw you both.”

“Where is he?”

“Kitchen.”

He follows the two of them inside. Peter is leaning back against the kitchen counter, drying plates. He is still in his pajamas and slippers. He no longer sleeps with his shoes on.

“We want to talk,” Natasha says.

“I heard.” Peter puts the plate back in the drainer and folds the tea towel. He sits at the table and pulls up his legs. He doesn’t look anyone in the eye.

“I want Pepper here,” Tony says.

“This isn’t—” Fury starts.

Tony knocks against the door to the living room.

“We want to share some information with you,” Natasha explains as Pepper shuffles past them to the unoccupied seat, “in the hopes that you’ll remember something that could help us. Details that maybe seemed trivial to you before.”

“And you think I’m gonna lose my mind about it?” Peter asks tersely.

Natasha says nothing, just opens a manilla folder and takes out a single sheet of paper, sliding it his way. “There is one file we recovered from the facility’s hard drive that has us concerned. It contains minimal information but—" She lets her finger slide down a list that has been haunting Tony ever since Natasha first showed it to him. A list that starts with ‘01q, November 03, 1991 - December 16, 1991’ and then 02q, 03q, 04q, dryly listed like it’s nothing more than a shopping list when it’s actually one of the most harrowing things Tony has seen black on white.

“What conclusion would you draw from that?” Natasha asks.

Peter slides the paper closer to him and studies it for a stretching moment. “We… weren’t the first,” he then says in a low, dangerous voice. “We were—There were thirteen attempts before us?”

“That’s our read as well. As you can see, if this information is sound, the first three lasted only a few months. The fourth one stretched it to a few years. 14q appears to have been another breakthrough. The first one where kids made it to their teens. If this is true, the entire operation is much bigger than we had thought, Ross invested not millions but billions.”

“That’s why they didn’t care,” Peter murmurs. “We were… just another test round for…” His finger slides down the list again, and now stops at the last line: 15q.

“Yes,” Natasha says. “That gives us reason to believe that a fifteenth experiment has already been ongoing. For over six years.”

Peter looks sick. “There’s twelve kids in another facility somewhere?”

“By now, possibly less. So what we need to know, Peter: is there anything you ever heard, maybe it seemed unimportant at the time, a location they mentioned, the name of another geneticist, or a name of a child. Each facility has their own doctors, but we suspect the security team rotates between the two locations.”

There is pain in Peter’s eyes. “I have nothing.”

“You don’t have to answer now. Something might pop into your head.”

“Things don’t pop into my head, Natasha,” Peter snarls. “I remember what I had for breakfast on this day five years ago. I have nothing.” He grips the edge of the table. “Except.” His eyes flick up at Pepper, then Tony, and he visibly braces himself. “Except a way to draw Ross out, which is me, because he wants me, because he invested billions, and if he thinks he has a lead, he’ll come find me.”

“Out of the question.” Fury is the one saying it before Tony has opened his mouth.

“All I’ll have to do is send a message to Mary’s old email address, telling him to meet—”

“You’re sixteen.”

“Don’t patronize me, I could get this done.”

“Your abilities are not the point of contention,” Fury grouses. “It’s a matter of principles.”

Peter’s hands curl into fists. “What are you talking about, principles? There’s little kids in a fucking lab somewhere.”

“There is also war and famine all over the damn planet, but I’m not enlisting teenagers to deal with those issues, am I?”

“How about,” Natasha interjects, “we use Peter as bait to lure Ross somewhere, but Peter won’t actually be anywhere near there when he arrives.”

It’s Peter himself who shakes his head. “And then what, when he gets to the meeting point and you’re the only ones there? You’ve got nothing solid on him, and he won’t tell you anything.”

“Who says anything about talking?” Clint grouses. “I’ll just put an arrow through his head.”

“And never find those twelve other kids?” Fury scathes. “Use your brain, Barton!”

“I could get him to talk,” Peter says. “I could, because he thinks he’s stronger than me, smarter than me. He doesn’t see me as a threat. Now that the 14q facility is a bust, he’d probably even have to take me to the 15q location. He wouldn’t have another option. If he thinks I only recently escaped, that I’m still loyal, that I’ll even help—”

“It’s a non-starter, Parker,” Fury booms. “It’s not happening.”

Peter pushes his chair back and marches from the room. The front door soon slams shut.

Tony looks to Pepper, the only other person in the room who hadn’t heard this information until now. She is staring down at the list, her lips pursed, deep in thought.

“Maybe it’s time to move him to Ohio,” Fury says. “For his own good. He’s too close to the fire right now. I know the two of you are—”

“He’s staying here,” Pepper snaps at him. “Tony and I can talk this out with him just fine. Let him have his reaction, first.”

“He’s not yours,” Fury says. “Technically. Or in any other capacity.”

“He’s literally got my DNA in his blood,” Tony says.

“And he’s not yours either,” Pepper adds. “He’s not a set of curtains.”

“I could get it done for you,” Fury says. “Birth certificate. Adoption certificate. Lickety-split.”

Not where Tony thought Fury was going. Pepper seems unbalanced, too. “You’d support that?”

“From what I’ve seen here, I can’t think of a better option for him. All I got to offer him so far is emancipation, a stipend, and an empty safe house.”

Fury could have worked this whole case stealthily, from the inside. But he stuck his neck out, drew attention to himself and risked Ross’ wrath by deciding to prioritize getting Peter to safety. Tony never fully appreciated that until now. He has always seen Fury as a utilitarian. The greater good before everything else. A misjudgment, perhaps.

He meets Pepper’s eyes.

“Okay,” Pepper says. “Get it done.”

-

“Are you okay?”

Peter breathes out. “Yes. I’m okay.” He sits at the edge of the lake, his slippers almost touching water. His notepad is in his lap.

“Are you sure?”

Peter nods.

The day is warm and cloudless, the breeze cool. There are young ducks on the lake. Everything looks tranquil and it feels unfair. An overcast, soot-grey sky and a peat-laden lake would be a much better representation of Tony’s state of mind. He glances at the notepad, balanced on the kid’s knees. “Whatcha writing?”

“Nothing. It’s a sketch of the chicken coop. You wanted chickens.”

“I don’t remember specifically—”

“Brahma chickens are a good choice when you have young children,” Peter says. “They’re relatively docile.”

“Ah,” Tony says. He shifts on his feet. “Uh, listen, kiddo. Hate to drop a second bombshell, but we were discussing your, uh, your placement. Here. Permanently.” He’s going about this in the worst way possible. Peter glances up at him, puzzled. “Meaning, you’ll stay here,” he tries. “If you’re… open to the idea.”

Peter rolls the pen between his fingers and assesses him. “You don’t mind?”

“No. I don’t—I don’t mind. No.”

“You’re not offering because you think you have to, because I got your DNA mixed up in mine? Because there’s several other people in there as well.”

“Pete,” Tony says, taking a gamble. “We want to take care of you.” He has refrained as much as possible from suggesting in any way, shape or form that Peter might need support or protection. But this is only going to work if Peter accepts the offer, entirely as it is. “We want you to stay here. Be family.”

Peter breaks eye contact, bends his head over his notepad. “I don’t like being alone,” he says. “And I don’t want to fight anymore…”

It sounds like a ‘but’ is coming, so Tony waits, but Peter stays silent. “Okay. Well. Good. Those are all… reasons to stay here, right?”

“I know you all want to—protect me. I do appreciate that. I… appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

He seems surprisingly calm.

Something feels off about that.

-

It all makes a lot more sense when Pepper shakes him awake at some point in the dead of the night and hisses that Peter has disappeared.

The only thing he took was a pencil.

Chapter Text

Peter is gone, and Tony finds himself constantly confronted with the tangible evidence that he once was here. The portobellos and oyster mushrooms. The draft excluder tape around the windows. The teabags in the spice rack. A forgotten wooden star still dangling from the hallway mirror.

Clint comes by again. He is furious. “I almost died getting that kid to safety,” he fumes, banging his fist against the wall of the shed.

Natasha has been moody ever since Peter disappeared. “No one says he isn’t safe,” she snaps.

“You shouldn’t have told him about 15q. He was thriving here.”

Natasha sends him a venomous glare.

“Knock it off, both of you,” Tony says. “We all almost died, we all care, we’re all in this fucked up little family.”

“Thanks, consultant,” Clint grates. “What’s the plan?”

“Our intel says Ross travelled from Mexico to Cincinnati last night,” Natasha says. “He probably still has no idea what happened to his asset.”

“Fuck Ross. I meant what’s the plan to find the kid?”

“If he doesn’t want to be found, he’s not going to be. We always knew he might take off, and the only way to stop him would be to lock him in the raft. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

Clint grumbles.

Natasha turns her laptop so the screen faces them. “My theory, Ross suspects Zodiac is in fact still holding Peter, or he’s at least considering it a possibility. Cincinnati is where Peter first broke into a Zodiac base and was caught. The SHIELD soldiers who found us in Chico never actually saw Peter, or even Clint. And the only two who saw me, are dead. Ross has no idea if Peter ever left Zodiac’s clutches at all.”

“One SHIELD soldier did see the kid,” Tony says. “By the railway, before Peter hopped on the train. Peter knocked him out.”

“Dead or alive?”

“I… didn’t check his pulse.”

“Rookie.”

Clint snorts. He and Natasha both look wickedly gleeful. Well. At least they’re back on the same page.

“Peter said he was dead,” Tony remembers. “When he talked to Fury.”

“So that’s that,” Natasha says.

Tony remembers a conversation — it was an afternoon in January after the first snow had fallen. They were all in the living room. Clint and Natasha were there. Morgan must have been at school, though Pepper wasn’t working that day. If he remembers correctly, the Christmas tree was still up because they are always lazy about taking it down. A common housefly had found its way into the living room and was dancing against the window. Peter spent a few moments tracing its movements, face troubled. He found a glass and a piece of paper, trapped the fly and carefully carried it outside.

He came back inside and hovered for a while, just inside the doorway, looking down at the empty glass with a frown like he was trying to solve a complex riddle. “I’ve killed people,” he said.

Tony remembers the instant need he felt to fill up the silence that followed, but not knowing the words.

“Me too,” Natasha said. Clint made an agreeing noise.

“It’s… very difficult,” Peter said. “I mean. It’s easy, but that’s what makes it difficult.”

“I know what you mean.”

Tony doesn’t remember how the conversation progressed from there. But he knows what complex riddle Peter had found himself struggling with. How can I kill people but save flies, and still be one single person?

-

They get to work. Or they try, at least. Tony keeps glancing at the bottom of his screen, where an alert should pop up as soon as FRIDAY has a lead on the kid. He’s got all surveillance camera footage in the whole damn nation going through her facial recognition system.

Next to him, Clint fidgets in his chair, and again, and again. “Fuck,” he finally says. “I can’t— My whole headspace is wrong. I’m too wound up right now. This whole thing just became way too personal. I need to chop some wood or something, smash a few plates. I gotta Hulk out.”

“Hey,” Tony says. “You guys want to help me and Pepper build a chicken coop? We already got the sketches.”

-

The doorbell stops working. Probably a loose wire, somewhere. Peter would have been right on top of that.

“When is Peter coming back?” Morgan asks for the third time. Pepper explains to her again, gently, that he probably isn’t coming back. Morgan still doesn’t accept it, only frowns angrily at them and crosses her arms firmly with an angry little ‘hng!’ sound. She’ll ask the same question again at breakfast tomorrow.

Tony misses it, too; walking inside to see Peter looking up from cutting the vegetables for dinner, very evenly sliced carrots and potato wedges. Or repairing Morgan’s alarm clock, all the parts laid out neatly on a tea towel. Or sorting through the spice rack to put everything back in alphabetical order because “one of you philistines screwed it up again”.

And then eating together, and Peter convincing them that they need to deep clean the fridge, or let him deep clean the fridge. Or that they should start growing spices in the windowsill. He’d pull out his notebook to show his plans for a vegetable garden, or a green house, or a bird feeder. He’d rattle off the names of all the birds living in the area.

He’d make some joke about statistics, the corners of his mouth twitching.

-

Peter is not responding to any of the hilarious memes I sent. Harley texts him. Everything OK?

-

He finds Pepper going through their entire CCTV footage, mouth set in a determined line. “We don’t have any pictures of him,” she says. “I just want to find something.”

She settles on a still image from a recent video file: Peter sitting at the table with Morgan, helping her with her math worksheet. The lighting is good and the image is sharp. The kids are both smiling. It’s still a little weird, with the angle from above.

“He might come back, you know,” Tony says as he studies it.

“Why do you think he left?” Pepper asks. “Because of Ross, or because we offered to adopt him?”

Tony has been wondering that himself. Is Peter out there, trying to track Ross down, or just laying low? He isn’t sure which would be worse: option one means the kid is putting himself in danger, but option two means he left because of them. Because the idea of being officially in the family was so unappealing that he chose to turn his back on them altogether.

Or the worst case scenario: “Maybe both,” he says, bluntly realistic. Peter didn’t want to be here and is putting himself in danger.

Pepper never likes it when he sugar-coats things, anyway.

-

He spends far too much time going over it again and again in his head; where Peter might be right now, what he might be doing.

If the boy simply bailed, decided to do this on his own, he could be anywhere. Though his chances of staying under the radar are best in a big city, and New York is the closest by. Tony imagines him staying in an abandoned house, or a homeless shelter.

No. No, that’s too obvious. The kid’s too resourceful.

If he is trying to bait Ross into meeting with him, he definitely went to New York. And then goes somewhere public, very overtly walks past security cameras, looking up into the lens, knowing Ross probably has some facial recognition software and would know he’s there.

No. No, that’s not right either.

Peter likely realizes Tony is looking for him too. So he avoids cameras. He slinks into a library, hood up. He uses one the computers to create an email account and sends a message directly to anyone on the Bio-Tech Force Enhancement Project. Perhaps he even sends a message to Mary or Richard, feigns ignorance about their deaths to make it seem more convincing, make it seem like he only just escaped captivity.

He asks to be picked up at a specific location and time. Please. I want to come home.

And then?

-

Pepper gets four Brahma chickens from a breeder who lives a few miles away. The chicken coop is ready for them when they arrive, looking exactly as Peter designed it. Perhaps tilted ever so slightly to one side due to Clint’s aggressive hammering.

The baby ducks on the lake have their first real feathers peeking through. Flowers pop up in the long grass. No one is around to teach Morgan the names of butterflies, so Tony orders The Complete Book of North American Butterflies online and puts post-its between the pages every time they spot one and manage to identify it.

-

Ross moves from Cincinnati to New York. “Sam heard it from a buddy high up in the NYPD,” Natasha shares, her fingers flying across the keyboard as she attempts reconstruct Ross’ route after he landed on his private airstrip.

Tony hadn’t even realized… “Are the other Avengers aware of this case?”

“Vaguely. Some more than others. Steve helped raid the facility.”

“What? You didn’t tell me.”

“Telling you now.”

“Don’t you all have some sort of Avengers HQ to hammer all this out together?”

“No,” Natasha says. And shrugs. “Not since you sold the tower and disappeared.”

“Huh. Well. That’s no good. I need to build us a little pied-à-terre. Somewhere where we can hang out in between missions and get drunk and make bets about who can lift Thor’s hammer.”

“Are you actually staying on the team?” Natasha asks. “After all this? You said it was a one-time offer.”

“I lied. I just want to be in the super-secret boyband again. But I want to be the sound guy, you know? Not the front man.”

“You were never the front man, Stark,” Clint says. “Please. Ever heard my sweet vocals? No competition.”

“I’ll build stuff. And I’m the consultant. I consul… consultate the team.”

“Consultate this,” Natasha says, angling her screen towards him. “What brings Ross to New York?”

“It’s the big apple,” Clint says. “Let’s not—read too much into it. Could be anything.”

-

The alarm clock blinks 04:02 at him. Tony blinks back.

If Peter did try to set up a secret meeting with Ross, he’d do it right around this time, when the city is at its quietest. They meet in a park by the river.

No. Too risky, out in the open.

They meet on one of the upper levels of a parking garage with sharp fluorescent lights, where the wind cuts through the concrete pillars. Ross rolls in there in the gunmetal grey car he favors when he drives himself. Tony remembers the sinking feeling he would get in the pit of his stomach whenever FRIDAY announced that car turning into the parking garage under Avengers Tower. Peter waits for Ross to get out and then—

No. No, that’s not right either.

Ross probably wouldn’t come himself. He sends a lackey. The lackey gets out of his car and Peter steps out of the shadows. Or he rattles down the steel, zigzagging stairway for a dramatic entrance. Pauses on the bottom step. Or maybe walks forward, pretending to trust this man, that he’s happy to see him. Peter tells him he only just managed to escape Zodiac and returned to New York. The lackey might not be entirely sure if he should believe it, but Peter is too valuable of an asset not to take his chances. His instructions were clear. He lets Peter step into his car.

Or would he force him at gunpoint?

And he’d enter the location of the 15q facility into his GPS. And Peter, Peter who has every series of letters and numbers he ever came across memorized perfectly in that overheating brain of his, he would know.

And then?

-

Tony somehow manages to fall asleep. He dreams of being pulled below the surface of water, sinking down and down. A recurring nightmare he has had since he was a little kid. This time, the dream is more serene.

When he wakes up, he can hear muffled voices carrying up to his bedroom window.

Outside, he finds Clint, Natasha, Fury, all gearing up to leave. An encrypted message from Hill told Fury to come to New York immediately, without giving details.

“It could be about anything,” Natasha says as she throws her backpack into the trunk of the car. Her jaw is set.

“Yeah,” Clint agrees, looking just as grim. “Could be anything.”

They don’t ask him to tag along, and Tony doesn’t offer. No juggernaut stupidity. His team can fix this.

He spends the rest of the afternoon pottering around the house. He feeds the chickens. Tidies. He thinks about removing the wooden star still dangling from the mirror but decides against it.

He hears nothing for a whole day. His phone finally rings when he is preparing dinner.

It’s Fury. “So,” he says. “Here’s what happened.”

Around four AM that morning, Hill had received a cryptic message straight from Secretary Ross’ phone. A series of numbers that, she established quickly, were coordinates. When she tried to call him to clarify the meaning of his message, Ross’ phone had already been turned off.

The coordinates led to a privately owned property in the middle of nowhere. The listed owner had a perfect record. Perhaps a little too perfect.

Trusting her instincts, she signaled Fury to come meet her.

“Did you find…?”

“The 15q facility. Eleven kids. Seemed relatively healthy, currently getting checked over by doctors. Scientists arrested. Most of their security team, too. One died in the shoot-out. One escaped, then was cornered later on the freeway.”

“Okay,” Tony says. He knows there is more.

Meanwhile, Ross didn’t show up for an important meeting that morning and his personal assistant had already raised the alarm. Hill was of course more than happy to spearhead the search. Ross’ phone was still dead, but they traced it back to the last known location: a park by the river. There were suspicious tire marks in the muddy grass which made them decide to send some divers into the Hudson. They found a gunmetal grey car at the bottom of the river. Secretary Ross was still behind the wheel.

“Oh,” Tony says. “Dead, I assume.”

“Well, yes.”

“Huh,” Tony says. “And, and…”

“No trace of the kid.”

“Okay.”

“A tragic accident,” Fury says. “Everyone here agrees. It happens. People drown sometimes.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“The papers will report on it tomorrow. Front page, I wager. President will even say something about what a great work ethic he had, that sort of stuff.”

“Will you—keep looking? For…?”

A pause. “Of course we will,” Fury says. “But we want to talk strategy first. Get our heads straight.”

“Okay,” Tony says. “Knock when you get here. Doorbell’s still broken.”

-

The knock comes two hours later. Tony has just put Morgan to bed. He sighs and rubs his shoulder as he descends the stairs. This is going to be another mentally draining evening, he knows it.

He opens the door. It isn’t Fury or Natasha.

Peter stands on the front porch. He wears a well-seasoned grey hoodie that Tony hasn’t seen before. There are two long, shallow scrapes across his cheek. He holds himself very still as he glances up at Tony, warily. “Hey,” he says, and fiddles with his sleeves. “Can I come in?”

In one swift motion, Tony yanks him into a tight, inescapable hug and drops a kiss somewhere above his ear. “Hey kiddo,” he murmurs. “I need to give you another haircut.”

“I need to fix your doorbell,” Peter says.

-

-

-

There is an ivy-clad house by a lake, a hundred miles north of New York City, away from the main roads, where the trees are close together. In summer, there are warm rainstorms and golden sunsets across the face of the lake. In autumn, the wind rattles the roof and piles leaves against the porch. In winter, the lake becomes choked with ice. In spring, the witch-hazel blossoms.

They take life as it comes. They fulfill their purpose, just by being. There is a little girl who digs through the soil to look for bugs, and paddles along the shoreline under the watchful eye of the others. There is a teenager, or perhaps a young man, who prunes the trees and makes chairs out of wood stumps and teaches the girl to swim. There is a man who looks vaguely familiar, maybe he was famous once, but now he hangs laundry and carries groceries inside and teaches the teenager to skip stones on the lake.

Sometimes they’re not around, and the woman will return home, sit on the porch swing in sun-flecked shade, look out over her empire, and ask FRIDAY for an update.

Oh, sure thing, ma’am. Boss went to the petting zoo with mini-boss and medium-sized boss. Mini-boss is convinced she’ll be smuggling a guinea pig home, you may want to check her backpack when she gets back. I have also updated the shopping list while you were at work, the crunchy peanut butter is on sale.