Chapter Text
Steven is trying to read. He really is. He's found this new fantasy series about kids who get kidnapped by androids...or maybe they're aliens...or android aliens...?
Either way, it's brilliant. The kids are just getting to the point where they figure out how to fit all their powers together, and outfox the bad guys with a cool team-up plan that no single one of them could've pulled off alone! That's always Steven's favorite part.
But his brothers are being so gosh-darn loud.
He bookmarks the page, stomps out of the little red treehouse onto the porch, and leans over the wooden railing. "Can't you argue someplace else?"
Jake, sitting on one side of the sloped roof, leans over the edge and sticks out his tongue. "How come you can't read someplace else?"
"You're not even supposed to be up there!" exclaims Steven. "Mum said."
"Yeah, Jake," singsongs Marc, like he isn't right up on the other side of the same roof. "Mom said."
"What, am I supposed to do the jump from down there?" demands Jake, looking scornfully at Steven's level. "You want I should fall and break my neck, ay?"
Steven frowns. "What jump? Where are you jumping to?"
For answer, Jake points to the next tree, further out into the yard. Still technically yard and not forest, but only just.
It's no good for climbing -- the trunk doesn't have any good branches or handholds until three or four meters off the ground. And unlike the one the treehouse is in, nobody's built in a handy rope ladder. But the crown has lots of thick, hardy branches. Totally strong enough to hold up a seven-year-old!
It would be a lot of fun to climb around in, if you could get there.
A lateral jump could probably get you there.
"He's not jumping anywhere," says Marc. "It's too far. Even from here."
"Is not."
"Is too."
"You're just scared it's gonna turn out I can do it and you can't."
"Am not."
"Are too."
"It's gonna look super cool," says Jake. "Just like in the movies. Steven, tell me with a straight face that wouldn't be a super cool jump."
Okay, see, Steven can't do that, because he's terrible at lying, and it would be a super cool jump.
"In the movies they have ropes," he says instead. "And harnesses! And -- and all kinds of things, to keep the actors from falling. Mattresses on the ground, too, in case the other failsafes break. We don't have any failsafes here at all!"
"Then I just won't break nothin'," declares Jake, and arranges himself in a crouch on the sloped roof.
Marc grabs for his shirt, but it's too late -- Jake launches himself into the empty air, for a second he hangs like a slow-mo action shot, suspended over the grass --
-- then in a flail of limbs he's in the far tree, one leg hooked over a sturdy branch, arms gripping the trunk!
Steven jumps in place and claps. Jake lets go with one arm so he can make a rude gesture in Marc's direction, grinning the whole time.
"Don't clap for that!" complains Marc, at the exact same second as something goes crack.
☽︎
Steven bolts for the house to fetch Mamá, while Marc comes running over to the tree. Jake is holding on too tight to look, but he can tell from the sound. They run different.
His arms are around the trunk, just-barely over some branches. His legs don't have any foothold at all. He tries to find a knot or something to stand on, or maybe grip the trunk with his knees, but every little shift makes the strain in his arms worse.
He braces himself for Marc to start up a whole lecture on how stupid and reckless that was...
...but all Marc says (from right under him) is, "Let go. You can land on me. Mom doesn't have to know."
And yeah, Jake seriously considers it.
But he can't. The thought of Marc getting a couple tennis shoes to the face, which would be kinda funny any other time, makes him feel sick. What if he breaks Marc's neck? He can't make this worse!
Dizzy with panic though he is, Jake gets a little flurry of relief when he hears Steven's and Mamá's footsteps running across the yard. She'll know what to do...
"Steven, Marc. Go into the shed and get the ladder," says Mamá, in that cold, steady voice she gets when she's being very serious. "Both of you carry it together, and walk. It won't help your brother if you hurt yourselves. Jake?"
"Mamá," chokes Jake. "I made it! I made the jump fine, but the branch--"
"It's okay, sweetie. Just hold on," says his mother, softer now. "If you fall, I'm right here."
After an achingly long wait, Jake hears Marc and Steven come back, metal ladder clanking in their arms. It creaks as they set it up.
"The ground isn't flat here, so I need you to help hold it steady," Mamá tells them. "Here, and here. Both of you, lean on it with all your weight. Good." It creaks some more under her weight, and her voice is closer when she adds, "Jake...you can let go now."
Jake sticks out one of his feet and waves it around, trying to find somewhere for it to touch down.
All he gets is empty space, and a sharp sting in his scraped-up palms as his own body weight tugs them across the bark. He yelps and holds on tighter, freezing up completely.
"It's not far." A hand taps against the side of his shoe. "Do you feel that?"
"Uh-huh," pants Jake.
"That's how close I am, okay? You're still a few feet above the top of the ladder, but when you let go I'll catch you, and make sure you touch down safe. Can we do one-two-three-go?"
Jake counts along with her -- uno, dos, tres, ¡ya! -- and, on the last word, lets go.
There's a heart-stopping second of freefall before she's got him, arms around him, making sure his butt lands on the top step -- the NOT A STEP one, the No Se Coloque de Pie one. It's hard enough to bruise, and the whole thing rocks dangerously for another second, but then it's steady, Mamá with one hand braced on the trunk while Jake clings to her and gasps for air.
"There we go," says Mamá. "You're good, you're okay, you're almost done. Tell me when you're ready, and you can follow me down."
Part of Jake wishes she could just carry him. But they've all gotten way too big for that. And it's not like he can just...shrink back down to baby size.
"Ready," he croaks.
Steven, leaning on the ladder, is already kinda crying. He does that. Not because he's a scaredy-cat -- he's the bravest one of them, he'll stand up to a bully twice his size with no fear, and he can't even punch like Marc and Jake can -- he just gets sad so easy.
Jake's brave too. He doesn't start crying until his feet are on the solid ground.
☽︎
Marc wants to yell at Jake about how stupid he was. Wants to really hammer in that Marc told him so.
But now Jake's crying in Mom's lap, like he's a little little kid instead of almost eight, so maybe he feels bad enough already.
Steven drapes himself over Mom's back to hug them both. Marc sits next to them in the grass, plucks a stalk of something, and focuses on carefully stripping all the little bits off the stem.
"How did you even get up there?" says Mom, half to herself, looking from the one snapped branch on the ground (Marc kicked it out of the way so Jake wouldn't fall on it) to the rest in the crown of the tree. "How...unless..."
"Jumped from the treehouse roof," says Steven.
Jake has calmed down enough to mumble a clear "Snitch."
"Oh, like she wouldn't have figured it out."
"Anyway -- Marc was on the roof too," adds Jake. Apparently deciding he can have a little snitching too, as a treat.
"Trying to make you get down!" exclaims Marc. "And now you know why!"
"You were egging him on," says Steven sulkily.
"Was not!" Marc practically vibrates with how unfair this is. "You were the one clapping and saying how cool it was! I was telling him he couldn't do it!"
"I only clapped after he jumped, because I thought he made it! And all the time you said he couldn't do it, he took it as a dare to prove he could do it. Obviously!"
"I wasn't!" wails Marc. He's having too many feelings, it's like they're a physical presence around him, crushing him, squeezing out his breath. "I wasn't trying to hurt him, I wouldn't, I would never, I was trying to protect him, I'm supposed to protect him, I'm --"
"Hit the ground," says his mother.
Marc hadn't even realized he started batting at his head. He switches to smacking and punching the grass instead -- which isn't nearly as much of a relief, but it's something.
"Of course you weren't trying to hurt your brother," says Mom, and that, that helps. "Of course you weren't, Marc. Steven didn't mean it like that."
"I didn't," agrees Steven, voice small.
When Marc has mostly punched his feelings out, Mom speaks up again. "Oh, Jake, you're all scraped and scratched. Let's go get that cleaned up, okay? Steven, Marc, come in and help. This is something you should all know how to do."
So they follow Mom into the house. Marc and Steven wash their hands while she gets out the first-aid kit, then Jake sits on the couch for Mom to sponge off his scrapes and cuts. He's got them all over his hands, and some halfway up his forearms. Steven and Marc plop down on either side of him to watch.
"Of course I want you, all of you, to protect each other," says Mom softly, rubbing some antibiotic gel over the scratches. "But sometimes..."
She's looking at Marc for this part, only, she's not really looking at him? Her voice is all distant. Like she's talking about something from a long time ago, and maybe that's who she's seeing, too.
"Sometimes, the people you want to protect are determined to go off and do dangerous things. You can try to argue them out of it...try to give them different options...but if they won't be stopped, you can't blame yourself for not stopping them. You can't force them."
"Suppose you could if you had mind control," remarks Steven.
Mom turns to him, startled. "What?"
"It's...it's in the book I'm reading? The bad guys are these wizards, I think. They keep their victims from escaping their evil clutches with mind control."
She nods. "Well. How many books have you read where the force-mind-controlling people were the good guys?"
"Um..."
"There you go." Mom smiles up at him, one of her small smiles, but you can tell they're real because they light up her eyes. "Even if you did have the power -- it wouldn't be okay for you to use it."
She wraps a light layer of gauze around Jake's left palm.
"Marc, run to the hall closet and get some gloves, will you?"
There's no way Jake will be happy wearing thick winter gloves when it's...late spring? Early summer? Late summer? Whatever season it is now.
But Marc goes to the closet, and there's a pair he's never seen before, skin-hugging gloves of thin leather. He pulls one on, just to double-check they're the right size, and not left here by somebody else. Sure enough, they fit.
When he comes back, Mom's in the middle of talking to Jake. "...natural for siblings to be competitive. Especially when you're twins."
"Triplets," says Marc.
Mom is concentrating on a tricky move with tape and gauze, so she doesn't look up. "Hm?"
"We're triplets," repeats Jake. "There's three of us."
"Oh!" says Mom. "Yes! Of course. Sorry, I must've been having a...moment. You're triplets."
"Monozygotic triplets!" adds Steven, who throws that word around every chance he gets.
He found it in a science book one day -- after he got fed up with the word identical, because it's not like Marc, Steven, and Jake are all the same person! They have separate interests, separate experiences, separate likes, separate scars.
Monozygotic means what they really are: people who all used to be the same being, which could've even grown into one single person if things had gone differently. But something went funny while it was developing -- something that split it apart -- and each piece grew into a whole person of its own from then on.
Marc sometimes pokes fun at Steven for the nerd stuff, but secretly? He likes having the word too.
☽︎
Jake is delighted with his new gloves. Exactly as his mother guessed he would, when she bought them at...
When she picked them up at...
Oh, whenever she went shopping for them. Big department stores are all so interchangeable these days. The point is, it won't be a surprise if he keeps wearing them after his hands are healed, just for fun.
She half-offers, half-threatens to get all the boys gymnastics lessons, to which they all swear they're done with daredevil jumps forever and ever. And she believes that's how they feel now, but "forever" is an unfathomably long time when you're...
Eight? Are they eight already? Or still seven?
Either way, they have plenty of years left to change their minds. Couldn't hurt for their mother to make sure they're in a padded room the next time they try it.
It's movie night, and it's Steven's turn to pick. (No matter which boys have gone through what traumatic events that week, the movie rotation is sacred.) She makes the popcorn and guesses -- again, getting it exactly right -- that he'll have their TV on the new direct-to-streaming Tomb Busters sequel when she brings it in.
As usual, Marc and Jake tease Steven about how he only likes it because the main character has his name.
As usual, Steven complains that it's a perfectly common name! Lots of Stevens to go around, in fiction!
Gosh, if anything, it would be a weird coincidence if Steven Maximoff didn't like anything with a Steven in it.
They all sprawl around the living room couch, her and the twins, sharing the popcorn and enjoying the movie.
...Her and the triplets.
She keeps doing that lately. Mis-counting the boys. She can't figure out why! Wanda has always had three sons.
⬡⬣⬡
"Look, you said she asked for me, right? By name?"
"Well -- yes."
"That means she wants this equipment running. Whatever her plan is, this is how she'll tell us the next step. Even if she's, uh...method-acting, a little too hard...to tell us directly. We'll get clues from watching. We'll put them together."
"Oh, the guys would hate to have a bunch of strangers analyzing them for clues. Even if it's really...sitcom roles made up for them, not them-them."
"We can limit who sees the broadcasts. Nobody you haven't vetted. But we can't not watch it. Trust me: this is key to getting them out of there."
Layla bites her lip at the beaten-up old TV, paused on a frame of three little boys cuddling up on a couch with (as far as they know) their adoring mother. "Dr. Lewis, I truly hope you're right."
