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Chapter Text

Stark Tower looked a lot bigger in person. The upper half of the building appeared to be in the final stages of construction following the alien invasion seven months ago. Instead of the large “STARK” sign she had seen in pictures, a single “A” remained. The exceedingly tall building was almost hard to comprehend from so close. An ache began forming in her neck from looking up so high. 

“Sure is a sight, ain’t she?” a male voice said behind her. She turned and found an older man with greying hair. His floral shirt was brightly coloured and he held a stack of folded papers in one hand. 

“Construction’s s’posed to be finished in February,” he continued, gesturing with the papers to the tower. “Said to be the new B.O.O. for the Avengers.”

She stared blankly at him. 

“B.O.O. stands for base of operations,” he said, “just a little lingo for you. You interested in the Avengers? Who’m I kidding, ‘course you are. Everyone is nowadays. I’ve got an inside scoop, lucky for you. Things no news outlet will have for weeks! Just for you, since you’re on the young side, I’ll offer a special discounted price. Fifteen flat. You won’t find a better offer anywhere.”

“I don’t need it,” she said, eyes returning to the tower.

“Kid, don’t pass up a good opportunity when it hits you square in the jaw,” the man cautioned. “Don’t ‘cha want to know what our heroes are up to?”

She began the daunting walk to the entrance. 

“W-hey, hey!” the man called after her. “Stark Tower don’t offer tours! Believe you me, I tried.”

“They will for me,” she said with more confidence than she felt.

It only took a matter of seconds to cross the ground plaza to the doors of the tower, but they dragged on. Every inhale felt like a meter, every exhale a mile. Each stride took her one yard closer to the tower, but the distance felt unimaginable. The doors were clear glass, with a frosted print at eye level reading,

STARK INDUSTRIES
200 PARK AVENUE

But it wasn’t the glass doors that caught her eye, nor how easy it seemed to pull them open (not like she was expecting resistance from a set of doors).

It was the lobby that stole her breath. She had seen many corporate buildings in her time, and, while sleek and impressive, the Stark Tower lobby was just that. A lobby. It was startling in its ordinaryness. The entrance she used was the right set of doors, mirrored about fifteen meters to her left by a second set. A security desk stationed between them sat three uniformed personnel, each with body armour and armed with holstered semi-automatic weapons. On the wall across from the entrance, she found a long front desk that looked more like it belonged in a museum of modern art rather than a company with technological pursuits. 

People were having conversations throughout the lobby, and every so often, the security checkpoints behind the reception desk would light up green, allowing employees entry after their lunch break. Someone brushed her shoulder on their way to the checkpoint, muttering a distracted “sorry” as they read from a tablet in one hand and drank from a coffee cup in the other. 

Having been startled out of her reverie, she marched to the receptionist’s desk and waited until the woman looked up at her. The lady was in her early thirties. Her dyed blonde hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail at the base of her head, tied with a black ribbon. When she looked up at the girl, her eyebrows twisted in confusion.

“How may I assist you?” the woman asked. 

“I need to see Tony Stark,” the girl said. It seemed as though the woman was used to strangers coming into the tower asking to meet with an Avenger or the man himself, Tony Stark.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, a false smile on her face conveying sympathy, “but Dr. Stark doesn’t take visitors without a prior appointment scheduled. Do you have an appointment?”

The girl shook her head. “No, but he’ll see me anyway.”

The smile started to slide off the woman’s face. “I cannot let you into Stark Industries without an appointment. What is your name?”

“Maria,” the girl grimaced. She hated that name. “Tell Tony Stark I need to see him. It’s very important.”

“I’m sorry, Maria. You will have to contact Dr. Stark’s representatives to make an appointment.” The woman looked away from the girl and made eye contact with a security guard, who started walking their way.

“Jess, is there a problem?” the security guard asked. His nametag read ‘Morrison’.

The girl turned to the guard. “I need to see Tony Stark. I will wait if I have to, but I need to see him today.”

“Look, kid,” Morrison sighed, “we get all sorts of people comin’ in here askin’ to see the big guy, but it ain’t happenin’ unless you have a reason to be here.”

“I do,” the girl said, straightening her posture defensively. “But it’s confidential.”

The guard reached for her arm, and she reacted. Her left hand flew up to grab his wrist and twisted. She ducked out of his reach and brought his hand behind his back. Instantly, the guards standing by the door rushed into action, pulling their guns.

“Release him,” one of them shouted. Another was talking into a communication device.

The hum of the building faded, drowned by her pulse. She held the guard’s wrist, not tight but unyielding, steel in stillness. She had been forged this way—move fast, stay quiet, never break. The guards’ guns aimed at her head and heart, but she didn’t flinch. She forced her breathing to remain even, eyes locked on the checkpoint. This wasn’t their fight; it was hers.

“Call Tony Stark down here,” the girl said calmly. “I just need to see Mr. Stark.”

“Mr. Stark doesn’t answer to threats,” another guard said.

A chime sounded through the lobby, giving everyone pause. Then, a disembodied voice with an English accent spoke from hidden speakers within the room. 

“Mr. Stark has requested the girl be brought to the Reid office on floor seventy,” the voice said. The girl remembered reading about Tony Stark’s advancements in artificial intelligence and figured the voice belonged to an AI. “Mr. Hogan is on his way to collect her. Please remain where you are until he arrives.”

Several of the security guards lowered their weapons, but the girl kept her hold on the guard. Judging by his relaxed posture, she figured the guy very easily could have turned this around on her if he chose to, but didn’t, which she appreciated deep down. While she could hold her own against him, the rest of the guards posed a bigger threat, in that they were much bigger than her in general.

It wasn’t long before a set of elevator doors opened and a man wearing a black suit with a blue tie walked out, pocketing his phone in his suit jacket. He pointed at the girl. “You. Come with me.”

She recognized the man from the pictures. Harold “Happy” Hogan, Tony Stark’s personal bodyguard-turned-head of security. She slowly released her hold on Morrison, and the man straightened his armoured vest and stepped out of her way, allowing her to walk towards Mr. Hogan. The man hardly looked at her before turning on his heel and striding to the still-open elevator. He allowed her to enter first. 

I honestly didn’t expect to get this far . 

The elevator doors closed on their own and began moving. Mr. Hogan pocketed his phone and faced the doors silently. She assumed the tower AI was in control of the elevator and waited patiently.

It was a quiet ride up to the seventieth floor. The doors opened to a nondescript hallway with several grey doors and bright overhead lighting. Mr. Hogan walked determinedly to a door around five meters down the hall on the left. There was the faintest symbol of a geometric eagle in a circle on the door, and immediately the girl knew what she would find once the door was opened.

An interrogation room.

Lo and behold, Mr. Hogan opened the door to reveal a small room with a mirrored glass wall to her left, and a table with two chairs in the center. Mr. Hogan motioned for her to enter. She acquiesced, sitting on the chair facing the mirrored wall.

“Wait here,” the man said, shutting the door. She could hear locks clicking into place, and while the sound set her nerves on edge, she focused on her reflection in the glass.

The girl she saw was tired, dishevelled, and had no business demanding the presence of the leading innovator of global technology. Her dark brown hair was dirty, tied into a ponytail, but strands kept falling into her face. The cheap grey T-shirt had a small rip near the collar. She had bartered with a homeless woman for the dark blue jean jacket, and it alone had several torn seams and ominous stains. It cost her thirty bucks and a bottle of illegally acquired wine in trade, which she got from the high-out-of-her-mind teenager walking home around the corner of Madison and East 47th. The best thing about the jacket was the pockets inside the polyester lining.

The door opened, and a woman with short red hair walked in, a small smile on her face. The girl wasn’t fooled for a second.

“Natasha Romanoff, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” the girl said, leaning her elbows on the table and showing her empty hands.

Romanoff smirked. “You know who I am, but I don’t know you.”

“That’s partially why I’m here,” the girl said.

Romanoff took the seat in front of her, blocking her view of her reflection. “Interesting statement. You came here to learn who you are?”

“And to see Tony Stark,” she said. “The two kind of go hand-in-hand.”

The agent stared intently at her for a long moment. The girl knew she was being analyzed for any weakness in her demeanor, and her instincts screamed at her to remain solid, secure, and calm. But in this scenario, it wouldn’t help her.

She shifted her weight and looked down at her hands. There was a long scratch running from the knuckle of her pointer finger to the radial carpal joint on her left hand, and she ran a finger over it, mindlessly picking at it. 

“How’d you get that scratch?” the agent asked, leaning back in her seat. The girl jumped as if not expecting the question.

“I can’t remember,” she said, which was the truth. “It could have been a number of things. Glass, concrete, a cat on Madison Avenue.”

Romanoff smiled again. “You called yourself Maria at reception.”

The girl nodded, pursing her lips. “I did. That’s the name I was given, but not the name I chose.”

“What is your chosen name, then?”

“I don’t have one,” she said. “Not yet.”

Romanoff nodded. “Can I call you Maria?”

“I would prefer you didn’t.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t like what it’s associated with.”

“What would it be associated with?”

The girl leaned forward, staring the agent down with intense blue eyes. The woman never faltered, and despite knowing that the agent probably had several weapons on her and could easily overpower her should she choose to, something hidden in her expression caught the girl’s attention. Curiosity. Genuine curiosity. It was buried under layers of false intrigue and serenity.

“You aren’t American, right?” the girl asked instead. “Russian?”

“I am,” Romanoff confirmed. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

The girl looked at what Romanoff was wearing; a black sweatshirt loosely zipped to show her green tanktop underneath. It was a display of comfort, of intentional casualness. “I only know what I’ve read.”

That got the agent’s attention. “Where did you read about me?”

The girl looked at the mirrored wall once more. “Is Mr. Stark behind the wall?” 

Romanoff didn’t answer. Instead, she rested her hands on her stomach and leaned back in her chair. The girl smiled grimly.

“You are loyal to S.H.I.E.L.D.,” she started, making and maintaining eye contact. “The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division, which is honestly a terrible name for an organization, but not the worst. You joined up, why? Why did you defect?”

Romanoff tilted her head. “I wasn’t given much of a choice.”

“That’s a lie,” the girl responded immediately. “You always have the choice, especially with your skill set. But you chose this life. Was it to atone? Or because you wanted to do some good for the world?”

The agent’s eyes narrowed but never wavered. “Something like that, yes.”

A tense quiet drifted over the room as they stared each other down. 

“I believe you want to help the world,” the girl said quietly. She relaxed her shoulders only slightly. “But I’m afraid you won’t believe me when I tell you you're saluting a false flag.”

Romanoff never showed any reaction, and the girl expected nothing less. “That’s a bold statement.”

“I’m known for my boldness where I come from,” the girl shrugged. “It’s why they’ve kept me on a tight leash.”

“And where do you come from?”

“HYDRA.”

Agent Romanoff squinted at the girl in front of her. “HYDRA dissolved in the forties.”

“That’s a very limited line of thought,” the girl said. “I want to preface this by saying I do not subscribe to their ideologies, not that you’ll believe me otherwise. HYDRA’s been around for centuries, it just wasn’t called that. Do you really think killing the leader of an organization whose motto is ‘cut off one head, two more will take its place’ will stem its influence? It only drove them deeper underground. Into S.H.I.E.L.D. Into every layer of the government. They’re in everything. I only tell you this to explain where I’ve come from and why it’s so important that I see Tony Stark.”

“You do realize this information makes it harder for me to allow you to see him.”

“I know, but I have no choice.” The girl suddenly felt a wave of adrenaline rush through her, driven by the surge of panic at the thought of being denied access to Tony Stark. “HYDRA is everywhere . Not just the government. Here. In Stark Industries. They were responsible for Mr. Stark’s kidnapping in Afghanistan—”

“The Ten Rings perpetrated the attack—”

“— hired by Obadiah Stane, who was a member of HYDRA.” That silenced Romanoff. “I promise you, I swear on my life, I’m telling the truth. HYDRA is the enemy, not me.”

“Why do you need to see Stark?”

The girl smiled wryly. “That’s even less believable.”

Romanoff leaned her arms on the table and grinned in challenge. “Try me.”

The girl bit her lip and, for the first time since she looked up at Stark Tower, lowered her walls. She let everything fall away, all the bravado, all the defiance, all the confidence she put on. All that was left was pain, fear, and exhaustion. 

“Mr. Stark is my father.”

Chapter Text

“Sir, there seems to be a disturbance in the lobby,” JARVIS’s voice rang through the 91st floor, interrupting the argument between Steve and Tony. Clint and Natasha were seated at the kitchen counter, a bowl of popcorn between them. They had been watching the argument for the last seven minutes, betting on who would kiss or punch the other first. 

“Tony’s way more impulsive,” Clint had whispered. “Cap may throw the last punch, but Stark’s getting the last word.”

Tony cut himself off from whatever rebuttal he was about to fire to ask, “What kind of disturbance, J?”

“A young girl is demanding to speak to you.”

“Well, tell her I’m flattered, but I’m spoken for and definitely not interested in being a child—”

“Sir, the child is armed and has now taken hold of one of the security guards.”

The four Avengers paused. Clint grabbed the tablet on the nearby countertop and pulled up the live feed from the lobby. The others crowded around him. JARVIS automatically performed a low-grade full-body scan that revealed a knife tucked into the child’s boot and a switchblade inside her jacket. She had the guard in an armlock and had six guns trained on her, but kept her calm disposition. 

“JARVIS, run facial recognition,” Tony instructed. The camera closed in on the young girl’s face, snapping a picture. 

“Initial scans are unsuccessful,” JARVIS informed. “Allow me time to run a thorough search.”

“Great,” Tony said. “Meanwhile, I’m going to greet our new guest.”

“No, you’re not,” Steve said, grabbing Tony’s elbow. 

Tony shrugged out of his hold. “Cap, no offense, this isn’t your tower. It’s mine. I’m a big boy. I can make my own decisions.”

“Yes, you can. They’re usually the wrong ones.”

“Uh, says who?”

“Stark, he’s right,” Clint said. “Let me or Tasha go. You don’t give a hostage taker what they want right out of the gate.”

Tony paused, staring at the video feed for a moment. “Fine. JARVIS, have Happy bring her up to the REID room, but please, remember she’s a child? Not some Chitauri soldier or super-sonic bad guy. And I’m supervising.”

“Not all children are innocent,” Natasha said, taking the lead and striding toward the elevator. The others followed in line.

They waited in the elevator until Happy gave the all-clear that the child had been escorted inside. They marched into the observation room, where they saw the girl staring straight at the window. Tony was caught off guard by the girl’s blue eyes.

Natasha, who had been watching the entire recording of the girl’s adventure in the lobby, handed the tablet to Clint and stepped out of her cargo pants.

“Woah!” Steve said, spinning around to face the window. “Is this necessary?”

Clint stepped in front of Natasha to block her from view as she grabbed a pair of jeans from the cabinet by the door. “She’s changing her clothes to seem more approachable. Better street clothes than tac gear.”

“The kid is trained,” Natasha said, shrugging her compression jacket off and swapping it for a loose black zip-up hoodie. “And whoever she works for trained her well. She was one hundred percent solid under pressure and at the business end of six guns. I need to mellow her out if I’m going to get any information out of her. Approach her as a friend. Get her to trust me.”

“W—Information?” Tony sputtered. “What kind of information are you looking for? She’s a kid.”

“How naive are you, Tony?” Natasha asked. “She marches in here demanding to speak to you, with weapons hidden in her clothes, and you treat her like a disgruntled board member?”

Tony didn’t answer, grabbing his left wrist tightly in his right hand and bringing it up to his chest. The others in the room watched from their periphery as Tony stared at the girl, taking measured breaths.

“She’ll be safe and sound, so long as she doesn’t make any moves to attack,” Steve said. “Happy didn’t confiscate her knives, so she doesn’t know we know.”

“Natasha knows what she’s doing,” Clint followed, stepping up next to Tony. “They’re both gonna be fine.”

Natasha left the room, reappearing in the interrogation room only seconds later. The girl looked up at the unassuming woman, and a flash of recognition ran over her face.

“Natasha Romanoff, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” the girl said, leaning her elbows on the table and showing her empty hands.

“See her hands?” Clint murmured. “She’s mindful of her body language. She wants to appear non-threatening.”

Natasha smirked. “You know who I am, but I don’t know you.”

“That’s partially why I’m here,” the girl said.

Natasha took her seat in front of the girl. “Interesting statement. You came here to learn who you are?”

“And to see Tony Stark,” she said. “The two kind of go hand-in-hand.”

Tony’s grip on his wrist tightened. He watched as the girl shifted in her seat, fidgeting with her hand. He leaned forward and spotted a long, thin scratch. It seemed as though Natasha had clocked it too.

“How’d you get that scratch?” Natasha asked, leaning back in her seat. The girl jumped.

“I can’t remember. It could have been a number of things. Glass, concrete, a cat on Madison Avenue.”

Clint huffed, crossing his arms.

“You called yourself Maria at reception.”  

Tony squeezed his wrist tighter. Something about this whole situation was putting him on edge. He felt flighty like he was about to run a marathon or on the verge of a panic attack. He bit the inside of his cheek to prevent himself from speaking.

The girl nodded, pursing her lips. “I did. That’s the name I was given, but not the name I chose.”

“What is your chosen name, then?”

“I don’t have one,” she said. “Not yet.”

Natasha nodded. “Can I call you Maria?”

“I would prefer you didn’t.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t like what it’s associated with.”

“What would it be associated with?”

“I don’t like this,” Tony said quietly. The words burst out of him on their own in a faint breath. His heart was pounding.

“Sir, I believe you should sit down,” JARVIS’s voice rang in the small room. Steve immediately stepped forward to lay a hand on Tony’s shoulder, and for once, Tony was grateful for the steadying contact. 

“Tony?” Steve prompted, face twisted in concern. “You alright?”

The girl’s voice interrupted his sudden downward spiral, “You aren’t American, right? Russian?”

“I am,” Natasha confirmed. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

“I only know what I’ve read.”

“Tony, maybe you should sit down,” Steve said, attempting to guide the man to the two chairs along the back wall. 

“Where did you read about me?”

The girl looked at the mirrored wall once more. “Is Mr. Stark behind the wall?” 

“Tony, you’re safe,” Clint said softly, leaning against the cabinet. “She’s confined to that room. She won’t be able to go through Nat.”

“I—” Tony cut himself off by taking a deep breath. “It’s not that. I don’t—God.” He ran a hand over his face, attention returning to the girl.

“You are loyal to S.H.I.E.L.D.,” she started, making and maintaining eye contact. “The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division, which is honestly a terrible name for an organization, but not the worst. You joined up, why? Why did you defect?”

Natasha tilted her head. “I wasn’t given much of a choice.”

“That’s a lie,” the girl responded immediately. “You always have the choice, especially with your skill set. But you chose this life. Was it to atone? Or because you wanted to do some good for the world?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“I don’t think she’s here to hurt me,” Tony had to force the words from his closed throat. Steve and Clint wisely chose not to comment.

“I believe you want to help the world,” the girl said quietly. She slightly relaxed her shoulders. “But I’m afraid you won’t believe me when I tell you you're saluting a false flag.”

“That’s a bold statement.”

“I’m known for my boldness where I come from,” the girl shrugged. “It’s why they’ve kept me on a tight leash.”

“And where do you come from?”

“HYDRA.”

Steve jerked his hand away from Tony, spinning to face the window. His muscles tightened, and his eyes hardened. It was an instant trigger, the simple phrase that echoed in Tony’s head. HYDRA. 

HYDRA, the Nazi science division that Steve gave his life to stop. 

HYDRA, that his father dedicated all of the war to ending. 

HYDRA, who somehow survived.

“HYDRA dissolved in the forties.”

“That’s a very limited line of thought,” the girl said. “I want to preface this by saying I do not subscribe to their ideologies, not that you’ll believe me otherwise. HYDRA’s been around for centuries, it just wasn’t called that until Johann Schmidt took control during the war. Do you really think killing the leader of an organization whose motto is ‘cut off one head, two more will take its place’ will stem its influence? It only drove them deeper underground. Into S.H.I.E.L.D. Into every layer of the government. They’re in everything. I only tell you this to explain where I’ve come from and why it’s so important that I see Tony Stark.”

“It’s not possible,” Steve muttered, voice low but steady. Disbelieving.

“You do realize this information makes it harder for me to allow you to see him.”

“I know, but I have no choice.” The girl seemed to suddenly radiate pent-up energy. “HYDRA is everywhere. Not just the government. Here. In Stark Industries. They were responsible for Mr. Stark’s kidnapping in Afghanistan—”

“The Ten Rings perpetrated the attack—”

“—hired by Obadiah Stane, who was a member of HYDRA.” Tony flinched, unable to stop the movement. “I promise you, I swear on my life, I’m telling the truth. HYDRA is the enemy, not me.”

“Why do you need to see Stark?”

The girl smiled wryly. “That’s even less believable.”

Natasha leaned forward. “Try me.”

The girl bit her lip, and then it was as if someone had cut her strings. Her body sagged as all of her energy left in one fell swoop, leaving just the shell of a tired, scared girl in its place. 

“Mr. Stark is my father.”

The looming sense of dread that began building when he entered the room caught up with him. Tony felt his left knee buckle underneath him and reached blindly out for the chair. Clint surged forward to help him down. 

“Easy, Stark,” he said, grabbing onto his right hand. “You’re alright. We can’t verify anything she’s saying. She’s likely spinning a story to get our attention.”

It was evident that the words weren’t meant to comfort Tony alone. 

“I’ve read the reports,” Steve said. “HYDRA was shut down. There were no attempts at resurgence.”

“Cap,” Clint said, gaining his attention. “There was an operation in the fifties, Project Paperclip or something. They brought in old Nazi scientists to secure their loyalty against the Soviets. If they used that as an in—”

“No,” Steve said firmly. “There’s no way.”

Natasha’s voice startled them back to attention. “What evidence do you have to support that claim?”

The girl closed her eyes, folding her arms over her stomach and tipping her head back. “Take my blood, swab my cheek, I don’t care. I know what the results will say. They wouldn’t have kept me alive if I wasn’t useful to them. The child of the biggest name in global technology is a powerful weapon.”

Her eyes peeled back open, and Tony’s breath stuttered in his chest at the sheer defeat in the almost grey eyes. “As for HYDRA, I wish I had something with me to prove it, but all I have is my word. I can give you names, but I don’t know many.”

“JARVIS, prepare a blood test,” Tony said, rising to his feet.

“Yes, Sir,” JARVIS responded.

In the interrogation room, JARVIS’s voice said, “Agent Romanoff, a technician will be by shortly to collect a blood sample.”

The girl looked up at the ceiling; her eyes were a little more alive than before. “Does that mean he knows?”

Natasha stood and stepped toward the door. “It means we want to verify your claim before moving forward. Wait here.”

The girl nodded, and Natasha left the room. 

It was hardly five seconds later before Natasha appeared in the viewing room. She shut the door swiftly behind her. “We have to seriously consider what it means if she’s telling the truth.”

“You believe her?” Steve said, surprise bleeding into his voice. “She’s expecting us to take her at her word?”

Natasha looked like she wanted to sigh, but held it in. “I’m just saying, we should prepare for what happens if it does end up being the truth.”

“Nat,” Tony said, twisting to face her with his hands spread out in front of him. “I need you to tell me. Do you believe her? About everything?”

Natasha took in the sight in front of her. The self-proclaimed and proven genius was wide-eyed and desperate, mouth tightly pursed and chest rising and falling with rapid breaths. “The girl puts on a lot of masks,” she said inevitably, “and she wears them well, but she’s not perfect. I think it’s likely she believes what she’s saying.”

A tense silence passed over them, and then Tony surged for the door.

Clint and Steve reached forward to grab him, and he jerked away.

“Stark, you gotta hold it together,” Clint said, fighting to keep his hand on his arm. 

“I-I just need to…” Tony wheezed, grasping at his chest with his left hand. “Oh God.”

Steve wrapped his arms around Tony from behind, one arm around his waist and the other coming to rest over Tony’s hand on his chest. “Breathe, Tony. Just breathe.”

“Yeah, thanks, Cap,” Tony said, still managing to muster a sarcastic tone as he squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, God, what have I done?”

“Hey,” Natasha murmured. “I said she believes what she’s saying, not that what she’s saying is true. Now’s not the time to panic. If, and only if, the test comes back positive, we will handle it. You’re not doing this on your own.”

Tony started nodding his head to the rhythm of Natasha’s cadence, which Clint noticed. “We will have someone go in and draw the blood, and we’ll go back up to the kitchen while we wait for the results to discuss the HYDRA equation. And we will move forward from there, okay.”

Tony took a deep breath, tapping Steve’s hand twice. Steve hesitantly released him. “I need to talk to Pepper.”

“I would advise against that right now,” Natasha said with an almost apprehensive expression on her face. “We wouldn’t want to worry her over nothing if this turns out to be false.”

He shook his head. “No, I made a promise. I need to keep it. I’m just going to—”

“Tony, Pepper isn’t even here right now,” Steve interjected. “Isn’t she in California?”

“I’m gonna call her,” Tony said. “I’m gonna go up to her office. I’ll meet you all in the kitchen when I’m done.”

“I’ll come with you,” Natasha said, resting a light hand in the crook of his left elbow. “I can help explain.”

Once again, Tony shook his head. “I can handle it.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. While still dealing with the aftershocks of an anxiety attack, he had an assurance about him that didn’t fit the situation. 

Noise from the interrogation room caught their attention. A technician from one of the bio-genetics labs had arrived to take the sample. The sample would be handed to Happy, who was waiting outside, and then taken to Tony’s lab to run the test. More accurately, he would sit on the lab sofa while JARVIS ran the test.

“Come straight to the kitchen when you get off the phone,” she requested. “We have a lot to discuss.”

“Sure thing,” he replied, already halfway out the door.

He spotted Happy waiting against the wall opposite the door and paused. Happy stepped forward.

“Tony, what are we testing for?” he asked. “JARVIS didn’t specify.”

“Oh, anything and everything,” Tony said, waving his hand dismissively. “It’s more of a precautionary thing if anything. And I want to see if I can get a hit on her DNA anywhere.”

Happy squinted his eyes but nodded, and Tony left for the elevator without another word. Once the doors closed, he addressed JARVIS. 

“Take me to Pep’s office, J.”

“Certainly, Sir.” 

He pulled out his phone and brought up the security footage of the girl in the room. She was picking at the cotton under the tape from the blood draw, and looked young. Young and tired.

“JARVIS, how old do you think she is?”

“By my estimates, somewhere between the ages of twelve and sixteen.”

“Can’t narrow that down at all?” He zoomed in on the footage, trying to get a closer look at the girl’s features. 

“I will once the blood has arrived to be tested.”

“Keep me posted.”

“As always, Sir, and might I suggest a drink of water once you arrive in Ms. Pott’s office.”

Tony smiled slightly. “Aw, J, you do care.”

“Your health is my primary function.”

“You have such a way with words,” Tony said as the elevator slowed. 

“I learn from you, Sir.”

The doors opened to reveal a sleek white hallway with large windows on the right. On the left were several modern offices belonging to people Tony hardly registered in his conscious mind. At the end of the hall were two double doors made from dark mahogany wood with steel contemporary handles. In front of the doors was the white and blue desk of Pepper’s secretary. Miss Yokota was an organized and energetic sort and always had a broad smile on her face even when dealing with the most unruly visitors. Himself included.

That smile was present on her face as Tony approached. “Mr. Stark! Hello!”

Tony let a genuine smile creep over his face. “Miss Yokota, wonderful to see you this morning.”

The woman let out a small laugh. “It’s almost four o’clock.”

Tony tapped the desk, “That it is. I need Pepper’s office for the next hour. Please make sure no one disturbs me. Or do, maybe tossing someone from the room will improve my mood.”

His words didn’t faze Miss Yokota. “Of course, Mr. Stark. It’s all yours!” 

He winked at her and entered the office, quietly shutting the door behind him. He pulled himself to the desk in the center of the room and sank to the floor, leaning his back against the white wood. He took a deep, calming breath, looking for the courage to call Pepper.

Instead, he shot her a text. He had no idea how busy she was today, and it would be more likely that she would ignore a text from him over a phone call, and maybe give him more time to prepare. 

TONY: Give me a call when you can, something came up here (15:51)

The call came not ten seconds later, a video request from Pepper Potts. He hesitated for just a second before accepting.

“Hey Pep!” he cheered. “How’s the family?”

“Tony, what’s going on?” Her voice was more concerned than her face showed. From her background, he could see that she was in her family’s home, likely working in the study to stay on top of meetings. 

Stabilizing the Extremis in her system wasn’t as tricky as Tony had expected, mainly having laid the groundwork out thirteen years ago. By the time Christmas came around, the most Pepper had was a light fever, which would probably never go away, and papercuts would never bother her again. 

But the entire process had been draining, so with Tony’s encouragement, she spent the rest of the holidays with her mom and sister. The CEO of a global tech conglomeration couldn’t afford to be away from a computer, however, so she was taking all of her meetings digitally. 

“Is it raining?” Tony asked, leaning toward the screen. “I didn’t know it rained in Sacramento.”

Pepper rolled her eyes. “Yes, it’s raining. It’s been raining all day. Tony, what’s going on?”

“You too busy to talk to little old me?” Tony harped. “Six days in the sun and she’s returned to her Cali roots and is leaving me in that sandy, sandy dust.”

“Well, it’s not very sunny at the moment, is it?”

“You would be correct,” Tony agreed, “although it’s not all sunshine here either.”

Pepper paused. “Did something happen?”

Tony tried valiantly to keep his expression neutral, but he cracked quickly. He rested his phone between his knees and ran a hand over his eyes. 

“I find myself consumed with…” he trailed off, trying to find the right words. Rip the band-aid off. “Pep, a girl showed up at the tower armed with a knife, demanding to see me.”

Ripping the band-aid off was bad advice.

“Oh my God, is everyone alright?” Pepper asked with a frantic quality in her voice. “Did she hurt anyone?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” he said. “We handled it. Or—we are currently handling it. But I–I needed to tell you because… I—we took her to the REID room. Natasha was sent in to question her.”

“And…?” she prompted when Tony quietened. “Why was she there?”

“Pep, she says she’s my daughter,” he breathed out all at once. “We’re doing a blood test right now, but… I think she’s telling the truth.”

Pepper had frozen on the screen, the only sign that she was still connected was the sudden ominous crack of thunder. 

“You should have seen her, Pep,” he continued, unable to stop the words once the dam had been breached. “She’s very good at putting on a mask, even Natasha commented on it, but there’s no way she could… once she admitted it, it was like the fight just completely drained out of her body. And she’s young, Pepper, but she’s at least twelve or thirteen, which means I didn’t even know she existed for her entire life.”

“Tony,” Pepper interrupted. “Take a breath. You said she’s twelve?”

“JARVIS estimates somewhere between twelve and sixteen. She didn’t look twelve, but she was young.”

“Do you remember fielding any letters about kids during that time?”

It was no secret that he had been with a lot of women. On many occasions, women had written to him claiming him to be the father of their child, but tests were always negative, and women were always turned away. 

“That would have gone through Happy and Obie during that time.” He squeezed his eyes shut. Obadiah Stane, who was a member of HYDRA. “And she had more to say.”

“Who, the girl?” Pepper asked. “What did she say?”

He went to speak, but his voice caught in his throat. Instead, he forwarded the recording of the interrogation to her. 

Tony watched the flurry of emotions fly over Pepper’s face as she listened to the girl talk. When the plot twist hit, he heard her gasp and saw her eyes widen. 

“Oh my God, Tony…”

“Sir, you asked me to alert you should I receive any results from the test.”

Tony straightened his back. “Go, JARVIS.”

“The girl’s DNA did not match any government databases and is not in the S.H.I.E.L.D. system. Based on blood analysis, I estimate her age to be around fourteen to fifteen years old. Further preliminary analysis predicts a paternal match when compared to your DNA on file, but the sample is still being reviewed by my systems. Allow me an hour to get a verified result.”

Tony couldn’t speak. He had so much he wanted to say, but it was stuck in his chest, an ache somewhere behind his arc reactor. He tried to take a deep breath, but the air didn’t reach his lungs. 

“Tony, please,” Pepper called. “You didn’t know. You have to calm down.”

“She’s been with HYDRA, Pepper,” Tony cried out, feeling the panic return. “I don’t know how long they’ve had her, or what they did to her, but my child was in the hands of HYDRA, and I didn’t even know she existed. I didn’t know there was a reason to be worried or scared or—”

“Tony!” Pepper shouted. “You couldn’t have known if the mother didn’t tell you.”

“But isn’t that what all the magazines say?” he said. “That—what? When you’re a parent, you know when your child is in danger, or hurt, or upset? That you know when they need you—”

“Since when have you ever taken fringe science as truth?” He paused, and she took the opportunity to forge ahead. “Look, you didn’t know, but you need to decide what you’re going to do now. This isn’t the same as some woman showing up pregnant or with a newborn. This is a grown kid who will know whether you accept her into your life or not, and that decision will have serious consequences.”

“Whether I accept her or not?” Tony asked, rearing back. “I’m not leaving her out to dry. Of course, I’m gonna take her in.”

Pepper gaped for a moment. “That’s not—Tony, I know you’re upset right now, but we need to think rationally about this—”

“Think about this? What is there to think about?”

She took a deep breath. “I know you want to do right by her, I do. And I will always admire that about you—that you care so deeply about people. But you need to look at the big picture right now. You’re not exactly in a good position to take in a teenager.”

“Here’s the picture I’m looking at, Pep,” he closed his eyes. “I see a girl who has been on her own her entire life, in the hands of possibly HYDRA, which I can’t even begin to comprehend right now without having an aneurysm. I see a girl who chose to come find me, at the risk of her own safety, just to meet me. Me , her father , who had no idea she even existed—my child. I’m not about to send her away. No way in hell will I let that happen.”

Pepper paused. “What do you want to do?”

“How soon can you come back?” His heart ached even asking the question because he knew how much she needed time away. He hated himself for needing her like this.

“I can be on a plane by nightfall,” she responded immediately.

“I just really need you to stand with me right now,” he whispered. “Because I am terrified, but I know with one hundred percent certainty that this is the right move.”

Pepper's smile was thin, sorrowful. “We’ll make it work.”

In a heartbeat, he fell in love with her all over again.

Chapter Text

Natasha had said to return to the kitchen once he got off the phone, so naturally, he made his way back down to the interrogation room. As he watched the girl through the one-way glass, he asked JARVIS: “When could I have—her mother, who do you think she was?”

JARVIS was silent for a long beat before his phone pinged with a notification. He pulled it out of his pocket and immediately regretted it.

JARVIS had uploaded an old image to his phone, a blurry picture taken on a Canon PowerShot. There was little light and the ocean and night sky looked like one black abyss. Standing out starkly against the dark background were two moving figures, Tony easily recognizing himself from his stupid slick-back hair he had in the late nineties. He was unsuccessfully lifting a woman by her waist in an attempt to achieve the Dirty Dancing lift. Regardless of how badly he was failing, the woman hadn’t grabbed onto his shoulders for stability, instead had her head tossed back and arms out, laughter spilling naturally from red lips. They were wearing very casual clothes, jeans for him and green sweatpants for the woman. Her hair was shoulder length, covered by a purple beanie.

There was a lot he didn’t remember about the nineties, most of which he was glad to have forgotten, but he remembered this moment vividly. 

It was fifty-five degrees, but the wind coming in from the Pacific was sharp and the thin material of his jacket was not strong enough to keep out the chill.

“You’re going to freeze to death if you two don’t get inside soon,” a male voice called from further up the beach. He turned and saw Happy Hogan standing on the second landing of the beach access stairway, wrapped in a black raincoat despite the lack of weather. 

“You know what’s gonna kill me faster?” a female voice with an Irish lilt sang. “Your new haircut. I’ve seen deer with better parties in the back than whatever you’ve got goin’ on.”

A startled laugh bubbled out from his chest, eyes finding a sight that made his heart race. There she was. Lauran MacNeal, standing with outstretched arms and her back to the sea, blue eyes alight with mirth. The dim parking lot lights at the top of the cliff illuminated her face in a soft warm glow. She still had on the remnants of makeup from the evening, but her eyeliner and mascara were a little smeared and her red lipstick had worn off in the middle. Her purple hat started sliding backwards off her head and a hand shot up to pull it more firmly into place before her hands found their way into the pockets of the MIT Class of ‘86 hoodie she had stolen from his workshop. None of the colours matched, especially the Cardinal red hoodie and green Fruit of the Loom sweatpants. She looked like a bad mimicry of Kevin McCallister.

“You heard the lady, Happy,” he said. “Go wait in the car if you’re too afraid to face the heat.”

Happy grumbled something before beginning to march back up the stairs.

“Wait!” Lauran called. “Can you take our picture, please?”

Happy swivelled to look at them, “Really? There’s barely any light. You won’t be able to see anything.”

She looked up to the cliff and shrugged. “There’s enough. My camera is in my purse. Please?”

Happy sighed and marched back up the stairs. Lauran turned to Tony and grinned, looking slightly manic with her smudged makeup. She made a fist with her right hand and held it up to her mouth like she was holding a microphone. “Sorry for the interruption, folks, but I always do the last dance of the season.”

Another laugh burst from his lips as he stepped towards her, hands reaching for her waist. “Dirty Dancing?”

She nodded, and continued her monologue in a surprisingly good American accent, “I’m gonna do my kind of dancin’ with a great partner,” her left hand squeezed his arm, “who’s not only a terrific dancer but somebody who’s taught me that there are people willing to stand up for other people no matter what it costs them.” Her voice became quieter, and her features lost the sharp excited edge. Her blue eyes stared straight into his. “Somebody who’s taught me about the kind of person I wanna be.”

“I’m not exactly Baby, baby,” he joked, throat a little tight at the turn in her voice from playful to sincere. “And I definitely am not a better dancer.”

“Tony Stark admitting his faults,” she gasped, right hand moving to her forehead in a swoon. “That’s so hot.”

He pulled her in closer, leaning down to hover over her lips, “Maybe you could give me an education.”

She smiled wider, pressing a light kiss to his lips. “Dip me.”

He did as she asked, grabbing her right hand in a firm grip and guiding her in an arched dip. Her giggles weren’t dainty or modest, but full-bodied, rib-shaking laughter. Infectious and silly.

“I don’t really know the dance,” he admitted as he brought her back up.

She shrugged. “Who cares if you get it right?”

Tony couldn’t argue with that, stepping forward with her in a way more similar to the tango than anything else, but he moved and spun and dipped whenever he could to keep the smile on her face.

At some point, she spun out of his grasp, shaking an invisible skirt with her fists. She started singing, a little off beat and out of breath, but the words were recognizable to everyone, and when she twirled to face him expectantly, he knew what she wanted. He let go of all shame, any embarrassment he may have felt, every reprimand he had ever received for being ridiculous, and joined in, opening his arms and bracing his feet in the sand.

Lauran took off running towards him and he realised way too late that he didn’t know where to put his hands, “Wait, Lauran…”

She jumped. His hands found her waist at the last second and he stumbled, barely managing to bring her any higher than his chest as she flung her arms out and pointed her toes. A flash went off and distracted him long enough to lose balance. They both fell into the sand, Lauran laughing loudly.

“Please tell me you got that on film!”

Happy lowered the silver camera. “I guess you’ll have to get them developed to find out. I’m going back to the car.”

“Oh, come on, Hap,” Tony whined. “Live a little. A little cold isn’t gonna hurt you more than that mullet is hurting my respect for you.”

Lauran rolled onto his right arm, covered in sand. She slapped a hand over his face and he sputtered over the grains of sand getting in his mouth.

“Shh, don’t be such a dick, Tony! He’s a sensitive type, you’re gonna hurt his feelings!”

He pulled her hand down and onto his chest, “More than you already did? You said it first.”

She grinned up at him, pressing a long kiss to his lips. His hands gravitated to her waist, then lower.

“I’ll be in the car,” Happy called. Neither responded, both fully focused on each other.

It was a few moments later when Tony pulled away. His hand reached up to pull her beanie off, releasing the auburn hair. He ran his fingers through it, tracing her jaw when he reached the end.

“Why won’t you let me fix this?” his voice came out a lot weaker than he wanted, almost a whisper. The sound of the waves grew.

Her smile lines deepened and both of her hands cradled his face softly. “You are so smart, Tony. I love your brain. I love your heart more.”

His breath caught in his throat. That was the first time she had said those words. He opened his mouth to respond but found his voice closed for business.

She kissed him softly. “I don’t need you to fix everything. I promise, I just want you as you are to want me as I am.”

“I’ll always want you,” he said. “But I want you alive.”

She rested her head on his chest, breathing deeply. “I don’t want you to be scared for me. I’m not.”

He huffed, rubbing a hand down her spine. “That’s what I don’t understand. You’re a lunatic for not being scared.”

“I’m not afraid of dying, Tony,” she whispered, squeezing him tight, “I’m afraid of not having lived.”

Tony wiped a hand over his face and was surprised when his fingers came away wet. He scrubbed more aggressively, trying to erase any sign of the tears and pull himself together. Another ping from his phone drew his attention. It was preliminary test results.

Waiting was never Tony Stark’s strongest skill.

He left the observation room with determined strides and reached for the handle of the interrogation room. He had only a moment of hesitation, then he opened the door.

The abrupt noise startled the girl, who jumped and turned to face the door with wide blue eyes. They were carbon copies of Lauran’s; very light blue, nearly grey in color and very expressive.

Those same blue eyes took in his appearance and filled with tears.

The girl let out a shaky breath, slowly standing from the chair. The chair was the only thing in between them.

Tony wasn’t sure what he looked like, but the girl appeared scared of him. Her hands waved by her thighs, a back-and-forth motion of her fingers.

“Hi,” he said dumbly.

“Hi,” she said back.

He fumbled with his phone. “I have preliminary results on your DNA."

Her face scrunched. “That fast?”

Tony huffed. “I’m Tony Stark.” But he regretted his attitude when she immediately wilted back into herself. “Not the point. Anyway, I have them here. Would you like to see them?”

She gazed at him, confusion written across her face. “I know what it will say.”

“That confident, huh?” he asked. He didn’t mean to come across as rude, but her certainty definitely aided her story.

Suddenly, her face shuttered all emotion out and she straightened her posture, lacing her hands together. “Look, if you have the results and still don’t believe them, I don’t know what you aim to get from me here.”

They both knew that wasn’t true.

Tony put up his hands placatingly. “Okay, I’m not putting my best foot forward here, I can see that. Although, if we’re being honest, that might run in the family.”

She froze, just staring at him.

He took a deep breath. “Agent Romanoff told me not to come in here until we discussed what to do with you. I’m not very good at doing what I’m told, obviously. And once I verified the test results, I…” he trailed off. He hadn’t come in there with any sort of plan, or idea of what would be the right thing to say. He was already screwing up royally, making her flinch and go on the defensive, all things he had done in reaction to his own father’s abrasiveness. A pit opened up in his stomach at the idea of turning into him, the very same idea that prevented him from ever entertaining the idea of having children in the first place. The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

But the girl standing before him, holding her hands so tightly and looking at him with eyes so blue and scared— he could see a reflection of himself in her, and he steeled himself. Tony tried to think of what he would’ve wanted to hear.

“I never knew,” he started. He locked eyes with her. “If I had known, I promise you, I never would’ve stopped looking for you. I would have never let you grow up alone.”
The girl’s shoulders dropped and her arms wrapped tightly around her waist.

“I don’t know how good of a father I would’ve been back then,” Tony admitted with a shrug. “I was seriously messed up—still am, in different ways, I suppose. But I would have tried. I know, deep down, that I would have done anything for you. I have to believe that.”

The girl took a deep breath, the tears returning to her eyes turning the whites red. “And now? Now that you know?”

Tony copied her breath, and for the first time in years, sent a little prayer to a God he didn’t believe in, that he was making the right choice. That he was doing right by Lauran.
“I will do everything to ensure I don’t lose you again.”

The first tears fell from her eyes and she hurriedly wiped them away. His heart broke. That was his child, his daughter, crying over her father saying he wanted her. If he hadn’t been such an asshole of a kid, he probably would’ve reacted the same way. It was all he ever wanted as a child to hear his father say “I want you”.

He took a step closer. “Can I give you a hug?”

He barely said the words before she launched herself into his chest, nearly knocking the breath out of him. His arms circled her thin frame tightly, and he rested his cheek on the crown of her head. She was pretty tall, at least 5’7 or 5’8. The girl’s chest shuddered with stifled cries. Tony closed his warm and stinging eyes. 

“I’m not gonna let you go,” he whispered, tightening his hold. “I’ve got you.”

Chapter Text

In the kitchen, Steve was pacing. Clint had perched on the counter next to Natasha, who resumed her original seat on a barstool. It had been nearly 30 minutes since they returned to the common floor and there had been no sign of Tony. 

“Do you think Pepper’s virtually reaming him?” Clint asked. Neither Steve nor Natasha replied. 

She reached for the tablet once again, turning her body to lean against the counter but rotated the tablet out of Clint’s view. A few seconds later, the feed from the REID room opened on the screen. Just as she thought, Tony was standing across from Maria, who was hugging her stomach. She left the feed muted, watching as Tony talked to the girl. She watched as the girl responded to him. And watched as Tony stepped closer to her. She watched them hug, a desperate clutch between the two that made her stomach sink.

Natasha knew what the DNA results would say without having to check. Her limited time undercover at S.I. spoke volumes about the mask Tony Stark presented to the public. 

When Fury requested her assessment of Stark, it should have been simple. She sat staring at her report for longer than she would ever admit trying to decide what to write. It would have been easy for her to write off his personality as nothing more than a reckless, self-centered billionaire seeking the thrill of heroics to keep his attention span entertained. Moreso would it have been on the nose to comment on the heavy guilt he hid behind falsities and the fear of coming up short at the end of his life manipulating his motivations, his actions driven by a need to alienate himself from his friends in a misguided attempt to save them from grief at his demise. 

What vexed her was his ability to keep the charade going for both of his closest friends, Pepper Potts and Colonel James Rhodes. Pepper’s reaction to learning about his near-death encounter spoke for itself. 

“So you really were dying?! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was gonna make you an omelette and tell you!”

If, through the fear and pain of palladium poisoning, he was not able to let the mask down, what was to say he would on a team composed entirely of strangers? When push came to shove, would he be able to rely on others to be part of the solution? The answer was evident, plain and clear to see: Iron Man protected people. Tony Stark protected himself. 

Iron Man, yes. Tony Stark, not recommended.

Then, the Battle of New York. 

A wormhole opened by a god from another planet unleashed upon the world an army from someone’s science fiction nightmares.

And who was left to defend humanity than those Nick Fury and Phil Coulson deemed worthy of the title of Earth’s Protectors. Earth’s Avengers. 

Regardless of his initial reservations, Tony Stark took to the team dynamic like a moth to the flame, supposedly unaware of how dangerous his dedication could be but willing to take the risk and make the sacrifice. He never dropped his mask, that certain narcissistic decorum that triggered eye rolls and cold shoulders, but he embraced Bruce as a scientist and teammate, much better than the rest of them. He never showed fear or trepidation.

“...and I’m a huge fan of how you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage-monster.”

“Thanks.” 

Tony Stark spent his entire life cultivating an iron mask. Not the one he forged in an Afghan cave. It was a mask so seamless and firmly bolted in place. As much as she hated to admit it, even she struggled to see behind the curtain until he launched himself and a warhead into a hole in space. In the hours after the battle, she observed him. He kept up his routine: one-liners and nicknames, witty remarks and a holier-than-thou attitude. But when it was quiet and people were distracted, she caught him.

He would look out of the broken windows to the fractured New York landscape, and his eyes would glaze over. He never looked up at where the wormhole had been, but he watched the first responders, the National Guard, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents all evacuating scared and dirty civilians. He would grab his left wrist in his right hand and squeeze. And Natasha knew then and there that he would learn and remember every single casualty from that day. 

She wasn’t around when the Mandarin was on his reign of terror during the fall and winter of the year prior, nor when the Malibu mansion was destroyed, left to fall to the ocean floor. She was there, however, in the immediate aftermath. 

It was very late at night on December 26th, nearly fourteen hours before Natasha was supposed to be at the tower for the grand tour. Tony must have already activated their access privileges as JARVIS had allowed her entry without question. The sleek elevator doors opened to a floor that looked quite different from the last time she had been at Stark Tower. In all fairness, the tower underwent top-to-bottom restoration after the Chitauri invasion and the floor she was on likely didn’t exist in this capacity two months ago. Gone were the vertically grooved stone walls and dark ceilings and in their place was a light-colored open-concept living area with high-end sofas that probably felt like clouds. There was little separation from the elevators to the living area, fit to comfortably seat upwards of fifteen people. The decor was minimal and understated; small knick-knacks on the mantle, a few magazines on the coffee table, a green throw blanket thrown over the back of the couch. Knowing Tony, those simple decorations probably cost more than the sofa itself. Overall, it was simple, comfortable, and restrained in comparison to the Malibu mansion. Impersonal. 

The floor-to-ceiling windows were still breathtaking.

Speaking of breathtaking, the only sound reaching her ears was dampened heavy breathing coming from deeper within the floor. She scanned the living area again, hand moving to the gun on her hip. No sign of life. Her footsteps were silent as she stepped further into the room. As she reached the end of the entry wall, she pulled the gun and turned, finding a smart and refined white kitchen. As with the living area, the overhead lights were off, leaving only the subtle warm glow of the under-cabinet lighting. 

The sound of breathing got louder, and she slinked around the center island. There, sitting against the cabinets was Tony Stark, knees to his chest trying to regulate his breathing. At her movement, a glowing repulsor glove aimed at her.

Natasha quickly lowered her gun, but Tony’s armored glove remained raised. 

“It’s me,” she said quietly. She holstered her gun and raised her hands in surrender. “Just Natasha.”

“You’re early,” Tony said. He let out a labored breath and powered down the gauntlet. “Why am I not surprised.”

“What can I say,” Natasha smirked, squatting down a yard away from him. “It’s in my nature to be nosy.”

A huff of a laugh erupted from him as he leaned his head against the cabinet. “Naturally.”

She settled down to sit on the floor. “I have to admit, I was curious when you sent Fury that housing request, which is not a thing, I have to say. Didn’t peg you as a landlord.”

Tony closed his eyes. “Not a landlord, more like a glorified motel manager.” 

She hummed. Her eyes scanned the kitchen, taking in the white apron-front sink just behind Tony’s head. It looked more at home in the Barton farmhouse than in a 100-storey office building in New York. The LCD French door refrigerator was the only sign that this kitchen belonged in a Stark Industries building. 

Natasha got up and took the long way around the island to the fridge, reaching into the freezer and finding the release to the ice box. She gathered two ice cubes and took them over to Tony, placing them in both of his hands. Tony flinched, eyes widening.

“What are you trying to do, freeze me to death?”

Natasha rolled her eyes, closing the ice box and shutting the freezer door. “I’d need a lot more than two ice cubes to do that.”

“Yeah, well, now my hands are cold and wet. Your fault, by the way.” Tony took a deep breath, eyes beginning to look more clear. She slid down the fridge to join him on the floor again. 

“You with me?” He nodded. “Good.”

As Tony’s breathing evened out, Natasha just watched him. There were dark bags under his eyes, not that that was new. The man never had a good sleep schedule before the attack on New York, and she can’t imagine that would’ve changed. Her eyes fell upon the wall next to the wide arch entrance. Where there was probably once a light switch now had a large scorch mark. 

“I’m sorry we weren’t there to help with the Mandarin,” she said. She saw his shoulders try to suppress a flinch. “Rogers and I were in Bogota.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t call for back-up. Didn’t need it. Rhodey and I were just fine.”

“Still,” Natasha murmured. “Not much of a team to leave one of our own to fend for himself.”

That got his attention. His head rolled to the side, eyes squinting. “Team’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? More like a one-hit-wonder with reunion tour potential.”

She snickered. “If you thought that way, you wouldn’t have asked Fury to reassign us to the Tower.”

Tony held his hands up. “What can I say? Didn’t think it would actually work.”

“Steve will be here tomorrow,” she said. “Not sure when Clint’s coming. He had some things to take care of first. I haven’t heard from Banner, though.”

Tony nodded his head towards the counter. “Grab me that towel, will you?”

She reached up onto the island, grabbed the white dish towel and handed it to him. There was a vintage watercolour portrait of a woman with victory curls. The caption read: How about a bowl of I don’t give a shit? She chuckled. 

“Did you buy these or Pepper?”

Tony wiped his hands. “Pepper’s gone.”

Natasha stilled. “Gone?”

He sniffed, not in an emotional way but more as if he had an itch on his nose. “She’s in California.”

The nervous constriction of her lungs eased. “Business so soon after Christmas?”

“She’s with her mom and sister.” Tony waved his hands in a vague gesture. “Needed some space after the whole… thing.”

She hummed once again. 

On the floor of the dark kitchen, Natasha and Tony sat in the first comfortable silence since they’d known each other. 

“Would you have come?” Tony asked quietly, interrupting the peace.

Natasha gazed at the tired and worn expression on his face. It was the most raw she had seen him except for those private moments as he looked upon New York in the aftermath. The man held no more energy to keep up a mask. His open countenance left no room to imagine any other reason for his question. If I had called, would you have come?

Her first instinct, surprisingly, was to say yes. Yes, if this Tony Stark had asked for help—if the man in front of her, on the verge of being broken in what was bound to be a moment left to memory come morning, had called and said he needed backup, she would’ve gone. 

But the logical part of Natasha understood that this Tony Stark conflicted with the Stark of her past. Where one was abrasive, closed-off, and witty, this Stark was unguarded, uninhibited, and fragile. 

“I don’t know,” she ended up saying. “I’d like to think so.”

Tony nodded once. “Thought so.”

Natasha felt something heavy settle in her stomach. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.

Tony huffed out a breath and stood. “You want a drink? I’m taking the pledge currently but I’m pretty sure we have the good stuff somewhere in here.”

Out of everything said that night, that surprised her the most. “You’re off the bottle?”

Tony started opening cabinets. “Allegedly.” He pulled out a bottle of Beluga Vodka, giving it a shake. “This fine?”

Natasha nodded, rising to sit on the center island. “Did you take your Christmas decorations down early this year?”

“Do you really take me for a decorator?” Tony asked, handing her a mug, strangely enough. She took a drink and felt the comforting tickle at the back of her throat. Despite his Scrooge-esque response, Natasha appreciated the gimmicky gingerbread man themed mug in her hands, even if it was a strange receptacle for vodka. 

“You seem like the festive type, let’s be honest,” she simpered. He huffed out a short laugh, holding out a finger in pause. The man sauntered out of the room, taking with him the dull blue light from the reactor on his chest. When Natasha was undercover in SI, she rarely gave the reactor more thought than necessary to find a solution to the palladium poisoning.

Here, in the quiet of an upscale penthouse kitchen, she found its light comforting. 

Tony returned, carrying with him bundled piece of red fabric. He tossed something in her direction. 

It was a classic bright red Santa hat. It was corny and so out of place in the home of Tony Stark that it made her smile. She put it on, looking up to find him wearing his own. 

“JARVIS?” Tony said. “Let’s pretend it’s still Christmas, will you?”

“My pleasure, sir,” the AI replied. Cheery Christmas music rang from hidden speakers and Natasha was struck by a sudden yet familiar pang in her chest. 

This Stark, this Tony, deserved to have happiness. Natasha knew, however pessimistic it would sound, that the story of Tony Stark’s life was always doomed to be that of a tragic hero.

Chapter Text

The girl was tired. 

The longer they stayed in the embrace, the more Tony felt her weight sink into him. It was a familiar exhaustion to him, one brought on by emotional exercise. 

“There’s a lot of things we need to discuss,” Tony said. His hands grasped the girl’s shoulders, holding her away from his chest. The girl’s hand quickly brushed over her face. 

He was suddenly gripped with uncertainty. Nothing in his life had prepared him to be a father, let alone the sole caretaker of a child. And this child was vulnerable and malleable. The dark part of his mind that whispered in his ears in the quiet of the night said he was in over his head. That doubt slowly crept into his consciousness. It wondered whether he was too hasty in his decision. 

But he steeled himself. What’s done is done. Throughout his life, he prided himself on being decisive, regardless of whether some of those decisions warped like the snake in the garden, ready to pounce within a matter of hours.

“When’s the last time you ate something?”

The girl, and God, it’s a little ridiculous referring to his own daughter as ‘the girl’ in his mind , shook her head. 

“That’s not exactly a time estimate so I’m gonna assume for now that you need to be fed,” Tony decided. “My roommates, you met one of them earlier, they’re gonna want to be involved in whatever happens next. We also can’t just push to the side what you said about HYDRA—”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” she interrupted. “There isn’t a lot I do know, but I know enough to get you started.”

He graced her with a small smile. “We’ll figure it all out. But first— food.”

“They’re leaving the REID room,” said Natasha.

Steve stopped in his tracks, spinning to face her. “ They’re leaving? What happened to him coming back here after calling Pepper?”

The redhead scorned him with a look that said he should’ve seen it coming, which, loathe he was to admit it, was as plain as his nose on his face. 

Steve acquiesced. “Where are they going? Up here?”

Clint leaned over Natasha’s shoulder to peek at the tablet. “Looks like they’re headed to the Medlab.”

Steve turned on his heel and started for the elevator.

“Whoa there, big guy,” Clint said, skidding in front of him. “The Medlab is secure. If Tony wants to bring Maria to—”

“She doesn’t like to be called that,” Natasha said. 

Clint sighed. “Okay, but we can’t just keep calling her ‘the girl’.”

“We shouldn’t be calling her anything,” Steve stressed. “Let’s say the paternity test results are positive. Then what? That’s the only part of her story we can verify. There is nothing we can trust about this.”

Natasha slid off the barstool. “If the paternity test is positive, then that is one piece of verified information. We can’t test anything else without asking her more questions.”

Steve clenched his fist. He wasn’t trying to be difficult, and Natasha wasn’t being rude, but it starkly reminded him of being reprimanded by Peggy when interviewing prisoners during the war. She was always on his case for bringing his personal opinion into the room, which, if he thought about it, should never have been a problem to begin with.

As a child, sickly and diminutive, he drew the short end of the stick for most interactions with people. He constantly found himself in a defensive state of mind. His ma, however, wouldn’t stand for any such rude behaviour on his part. 

“Your life is always going to be a difficult one, but don’t let that harden your heart.”

Bucky had helped tremendously. Where Steve had the option to be kind and forgive, Bucky would gladly ram someone’s nose into a brick wall in defense of the little guy. It didn’t stop Steve from picking a fight with anyone who had it coming, but sometimes, the buffer helped keep his heart warm when there was no heat.

Sarah Rogers loved Bucky but loved what he provided for Steve even more: a sense of belonging. The two of them were inseparable, and his death hardened a part of his heart. He hadn’t realised until Peggy was pulling him from rooms, berating him for letting his emotions cloud his judgement. 

In some aspects, it felt like Steve had fallen from the train with him. 

“We need a plan,” Steve said, forcefully tugging his mind back to focus. 

“O’ Captain, my Captain,” Clint saluted. “What do you want to start with? Keeping in mind we’ll probably have to dance around Tony if he’s committed to this whole ‘single parent to a long-lost-child’ shtick.”

It bolstered him that the two agents looked to him for leadership. This arrangement within the tower had been a relatively recent development. While he and Natasha had gone on a couple of missions together for Fury, they had not been put into a situation that garnered strategic leadership since the Chitauri. It was a small thing, insignificant in the long run, but it eased some of the tension building in his back. 

“Any and all information about HYDRA should be our priority,” Steve declared, walking to the elevator again. “I want to know every detail. If there’s even a fragment of truth to the claim, I want to get ahead of it. We stomped HYDRA out before, and I’ll be damned if I let them run free again.”

“Before you begin your tirade, Captain, if you will,” JARVIS’s voice rang, causing Steve to look up. “Sir has anticipated your arrival and requests you bring food for our guest.”

When the elevator doors opened, the girl stiffened. She couldn’t stop the reaction. It was learned behaviour.

HYDRA never boasted about having a sleek, modern workspace in its laboratories, but some features were universal. While glass partitions separated the cubicles, deep blue curtains hung from a ceiling track. Several metal laboratory tables were visible from the entrance. The lighting was harsh, and her sensitive eyes stung at the brightness.

The longer she looked, the more differences she noticed as Tony guided her to one of the partitioned areas. Sections of the ceiling were trayed, and a low blue light emitted from somewhere within the indentation. As they progressed into the room, a central walkway between stations was slowly illuminated. She would almost call it welcoming if she weren’t so on edge. 

Another difference emerged when Tony asked her to sit on a bed in one of the partitioned rooms. The bed itself was unassuming. It made her nervous. She sat down anyway.

It was soft. Running her hand over the outer fabric of the light blue blanket felt like petting the cat on Madison Avenue, but even better. She grinned, remembering… something. It was a clouded memory, even though it felt recent in an inexplicable way. 

Juniper.

“Come again?” Tony asked, looking away from his tablet. She jerked up to meet his eyes. 

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t realise I was talking out loud.”

He shook his head. “No matter. Who’s Juniper?”

She glanced back down at the blanket. “I don’t really remember. But this is soft, and it reminded me of the name.”

Tony stilled. “You often have trouble with your memory?”

“Sometimes,” she offered. “I remember a lot of things that happened recently, and I remember a lot of things that happened months ago, years ago, but sometimes it’s just… cloudy.”

Tony hummed. “Do you know your birthday?”

She met his eyes. “December eighth, 1997.”

“So, you just turned fifteen.”

“Yes.”

The man took a deep breath, staring at her unnervingly. He held that stare for a long moment before, “I feel like most fifteen-year-olds are shorter.”

She smiled. “I grew six inches between eleven and twelve. Outgrew all of the boys in class. They were pretty sensitive about it until they caught up within six months.”

“Class?” Tony asked, settling into the armchair next to the bed. A light appeared over the bed. It moved horizontally over her body, and she held her breath. “Don’t worry about that. It’s just JARVIS giving you a quick scan.”

She had a million-and-one questions but decided they could wait. He asked first.

“There was an academy,” she began. Her legs swung up onto the bed so she could rest her arms on her knees. “They called it the HYDRA Preparatory Academy. People within HYDRA send their kids there as, like, a boarding school, I guess. I was sent there sometime after I turned eight, I think. That part is kind of hazy.”

Tony glanced at the tablet again. “Do you know where it was?”

“Kentucky,” she answered. “In the mountains. At least, I’m pretty sure it was Kentucky. Maybe North Carolina? There wasn’t a lot of sun in the winter, and it took about an hour and a half to get to somewhere near Waco, Texas, by aircraft. If that helps.”

The girl heard the elevator doors open, and several footsteps headed their way. The drawn privacy curtain blocked her vision. She removed her feet from the bed but remained seated. Tony didn’t seem concerned with the approaching crowd, and she had already resolved to follow his lead. 

She wasn’t sure that was the best move when the crowd rounded the partition, and she was suddenly face-to-face with Captain America.

Although wearing a light grey button-down and belted blue jeans, the man still looked like he was in full military dress. His arms crossed over his large chest, and his shoulders squared, he cast an intimidating shadow on the two smaller people flanking him. 

One of the people was Agent Romanoff. Her hands were in the pockets of her sweatpants. The man to the Captain’s left was the archer, Barton. She didn’t know much about him, but he was holding two Tupperware containers of what she assumed was some kind of food. At the mere thought of eating, her stomach growled.

“Legolas, you’re a dream,” Tony groaned, shifting to seize the containers from Barton.

“Wait, Tony,” Captain America instructed. “We have questions we need answered first.”

Tony bristled. “I’m not withholding food in exchange for answers, Captain.”

The two men had a tense conversation that consisted only of intense eye contact. The suspense drove her to sit more upright. 

“Settle, boys,” Agent Romanoff said. She slid past the Captain to lean against the glass and curtain partition directly at the foot of the bed. “We have plenty of time. Let the girl eat.”

Having been overruled, the Captain stepped back, allowing Barton to hand the containers to Tony. Tony stared deeply at the contents of either container for a beat before holding the one in his right hand out to the girl. She hesitated long enough for Tony to continue the motion by placing it on the bed beside her.

“It’s nothing special,” the archer said. “Reheated chicken breast and Kraft mac.” 

The girl considered the contents of her container. Two pieces of chicken breast were causing condensation to form on the sides from steam. The ‘Kraft mac’ he described was a cheesy noodle, macaroni , she realised belatedly. 

She noticed Tony’s container only had one chicken breast within it. While it was bigger than both of hers, the portions weren’t equal. The man seemed unphased by this as he took the plastic fork from the container and began eating. She took her cue from him and picked up her fork.

A clang distracted her instantly, her head bouncing up in response. While she had been examining her food, Barton had left the entryway and returned with two metal stools, which he then placed in the room. One was set in front of the Captain. It perturbed her that she didn’t notice him leaving in the first place. He took his perch atop one of the stools and gestured at the Captain to take the other. The Captain shook his head slightly and used his foot to nudge it towards Romanoff. The squeak of the stool on the floor was jarring in the quiet room. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tony give an exaggerated eye-roll. 

“Jeez, I know it’s been a day of intense revelations and the sort, but could you at least act like we’re a well-put-together team here? I’m itching to write a peer assessment like I’m in high school all over again.” 

“Alright, let’s focus,” the Captain said sternly, disregarding Tony’s comment. “HYDRA.”

“Yes, sir,” the girl said. 

“HYDRA died with the Red Skull.”

The girl felt the automatic response leave her mouth, “Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.”

The Captain’s eyes narrowed. “Prove it.”

The girl set down her food; she wouldn’t have enough time to eat between the revolving door of questions anyway. “HYDRA, as you know it, was founded under the belief that humanity couldn’t be trusted to hold its own freedom. That we, as humans, would bring about our own demise left to our own devices. But as you probably know, humanity resisted and will continue to resist if outright suppressed.” She took a deep breath. “In the wake of the war, the last remaining heads of HYDRA—”

“Heads?” Barton interrupted.

She nodded. “Fenhoff. Malick. Zola.” She paused, watching Romanoff and the Captain exchange a questioning glance. “You don’t know who they are?”

The Captain adjusted his stance, eyes still on Romanoff. “Armin Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull.”

The girl shrugged, “Swiss, but still.”

Romanoff stepped forward. “Malick. Do you mean Gideon Malick?”

The girl looked at her with squinted eyes. “Is he related to Wilfred Malick?”

Romanoff glanced at Barton and Tony, who turned his tablet back on and started typing. In less than thirty seconds, he swiped his hand across the tablet toward the far wall, where a projection appeared. 

“Gideon Malick,” the AI’s voice once again startled the girl, “is the son of Wilfred and Irene Malick, along with his brother, Nathaniel Malick, who was reported missing on February 19th, 1970. A death certificate was filed by Gideon Malick two days following his disappearance.”

Romanoff crossed her arms. “Gideon Malick is on the World Security Council.”

The girl had heard of the WSC in passing but knew little about it. However, the news immediately affected the others in the room. Tony straightened in his seat. Barton spun to face Romanoff with an intense expression. 

“So, that’s significant,” the girl commented. “I’ve only heard of the WSC in passing.”

“Steve,” Tony said, garnering the Captain’s attention. “The drone strike.”

“I’m following,” the Captain muttered.

After a moment, with no further interruptions, she continued. “The remaining heads restructured the goal of HYDRA. In their words, ‘humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly’. When S.H.I.E.L.D. was founded, they unknowingly recruited members of HYDRA. At least, I assume it was unknowingly. The anonymity allowed HYDRA to grow like a symbiotic parasite.”

 When no one spoke, she marched forward. “For the last seventy years, HYDRA has had its hands in virtually every major crisis. Every election, every negotiation, every tragedy. They’ve been at the helm of several major assassinations. They feed global crises and reap the benefits of disaster.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. would’ve stopped it,” Romanoff muttered. 

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know everything. They wouldn’t tell me everything, but what I do know, and what I can infer from experience, is that anyone high-ranking enough to do anything about HYDRA would’ve been dealt with. They have resources that are scarily efficient and lethal. They aren’t afraid of altering history to suit their needs.” 

The Captain exhaled sharply. “And you? What was your part?” 

Orange light. Dark room. Purple shadows. Screams.

She flinched.

“I was a student.”

Tony, who had been shifting in his seat, stood up. “She described something called the HYDRA Preparatory Academy.”

“An academy?” Barton asked. “Like, to train miniature HYDRA agents into the ‘new world order’.”

“Basically,” she nodded. “But they removed me from the program in May.” Again, the Avengers all looked at each other meaningfully. “I was unconscious during the trip, but when I woke up, I was in a new facility. That’s where I was until three days ago.”

The girl eyed her food in the forgotten container longingly. Romanoff reached over and set it back on her lap, nodding once when the girl glanced up at her. She took a bite of the ‘Kraft mac’. It was alright, if slightly cold. The texture of congealing cheese made her sick to her stomach to think about it, but she hadn’t earned the right to be a picky eater.

“Do you know the location of this facility?” the Captain said. 

She finished chewing a piece of the chicken breast. “Can I see a map of the city?”

After a few more taps on the tablet, a large map appeared beside the bed, replacing the details about the Malick family. She placed the food down again and slid off the bed to examine it more closely. As she did, she mentally retraced her steps.

“It was near water,” she murmured under her breath. She faced Tony. “How do I zoom in?”

The man got up and rounded the bed, then demonstrated simple gestures to navigate the map in the projection. Zooming in, rotating, grabbing and dragging. The simplicity of the motions only added to the questions in her mind about the technology itself.

Using Tony’s instructions, she backtracked South of Manhattan, finding the two ferry systems she had snuck onto in the rear of a pickup truck with a flatbed cover. She pointed at a building near the waterfront.

“There.”

The AI promptly arranged several images of the building in the projection, including a clear satellite image and several photographs taken from street view, seemingly quite old in age. The building in the photographs was dilapidated and non-functional. 

“That’s in Brooklyn,” the Captain said with surprise. 

“How did you get across the bay?” Romanoff asked. 

The girl felt a small smile twitch at the corner of her mouth. “I knew I needed to get to Manhattan, and I couldn’t very well ask anyone for a ride because I didn’t exactly know where I needed to go and couldn’t answer any questions. So, instead, I found the ferry terminal and hung around a gas station nearby and just… listened. Eventually, these two men showed up in a large flatbed truck and they were talking about the ferry schedule. It was dark, so I just climbed into their flatbed and closed the cover.”

Romanoff hummed. She saw Tony’s hand flutter in the air behind her briefly, hesitantly, before it slid into his pants pocket. 

“What’s located there?” Barton asked. 

The girl returned to sit on the bed. Her voice was somber: “I never saw other kids, but I know there were at least two, maybe more.” 

“Any defenses?” Romanoff questioned. “What did they have you do there?”

Screaming.

“Experiments,” she said. Her eyes were unfocused, and the soft blue light from the projection warped in her mind’s eye. It no longer felt welcoming but dangerously inviting. 

Steve felt a hand touch his elbow. Looking down, he found Natasha staring up at him. She motioned with her head to the hall, and he followed. Behind him, he could hear Tony and Clint attempt to get Maria’s attention. 

Natasha led him further into the Medlab, finding an empty office to duck into. There were only two things on the wall behind the desk: a crude child’s drawing of a man in a blue coat and the Hulk holding hands and a doctorate’s diploma for Biochemistry. With a jolt, he realized the office was supposed to belong to Dr. Banner.

“We need to contact Fury,” Natasha stated, bringing him back to present. 

“No,” he instantly protested. “If this is as deep as she says it is, we can’t trust anyone.”

“Not even Fury?” Natsha’s eyes squinted in accusation. 

Steve huffed in frustration. “How can you, of all people, trust anyone right now?” He paused, waiting for her answer. 

A chill touched the base of his neck, setting his nerves on edge. His body reacted instantly, slowing his heart rate, his breathing. 

“What do you know?”

Natasha tilted her head. “About what?”

In an instant, Steve had her against the wall with his hands on her biceps. He felt them twitch, wanting to react.

“Who are you working for?”

Tension rolled over her face. “S.H.I.E.L.D., same as you.”

“Do better.”

A fierce look appeared in her eyes. “So little trust, Steve. And I thought I was jumpy.”

“What do you know?” he asked again. 

“I only act like I know everything, Rogers.”

Steve glanced at the door, ensuring they were still alone. “Did you know about the World Security Council ordering the drone strike?”

She held eye contact. “Yes. But I thought everyone knew that.”

Steve narrowed his eyes. “How would we have known?”

Natasha hesitated. “I thought Fury would’ve told you.”

He held his breath, waiting for her response. She wasn’t forthcoming. “And how did that work out for you?”

“About like this, I’d say.”

Staring into her green eyes, he tried to find something to latch onto. Some weakness or mistruth. They were guarded but earnest. He slowly eased the grip on her shoulders. “And you ask why I don’t want to involve Fury.”

The corner of Natasha’s lips quirked up. “There’s a chance you joined the wrong business, Rogers.” 

Steve fully released her, facing the kid’s drawing. The kid must’ve used a lot of pressure on the crayons, given the waxy texture of the heavily pigmented colors. Now knowing this was supposed to be Bruce’s office, the drawing felt naive and innocent in only the way a child could emulate. Unaware of danger and seeing the best in people.

He struggled to remember when he saw the best in people, too. 

“For as long as I can remember, I just wanted to do what was right.” His eyes drifted back to Natasha, finding her fervent stare. “I guess I’m not quite sure what that is anymore.”

He leaned against the desk, hands folded against his lap. “And I thought I could throw myself back in, follow orders… Serve.” His hand rubbed hard over his mouth. “I kept wondering why it didn’t feel the same.”

Natasha slowly approached him, perching on the desk beside him. “Why did you stay? I think you’ve more than earned the right to a never-ending vacation.”

“Peggy,” he said, heart aching at the mere thought. He lowered his head to smother the sudden emotion overwhelming him. “She founded S.H.I.E.L.D. God, what would she think?”

Her sweatpants rustled as she shifted in place.

“When I first joined S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Natasha started softly, “I thought I was going straight. But I guess I just traded in the KGB for HYDRA. I thought I knew whose lies I was telling, but I guess I can’t tell the difference anymore.”

This vulnerability was strange, coming from the agent whose skillset relied on lies and subterfuge. Maybe it was an exchange—some sort of confessional tit-for-tat. But her body was close to his, and in the proximity, he felt the anxiety she was trying to hide.

“There’s a chance you might be in the wrong business, Romanoff.”

She huffed. “May not be ideal, but it’s the business we’re in.” 

Even with his heightened hearing, there wasn’t a trace of the others within the Medlab floor. Steve could only hear their shared breaths. 

“Okay,” Natasha said. “No Fury.”

“No Fury,” he agreed. “Not until we know how deep it goes.”

“And what about me?” At his questioning glance, she continued, “Do you trust me?”

Her eyes bore into his. When he didn’t answer, she asked, “If it was down to me to save your life—now, you be honest with me—would you trust me to do it?”

On this day, Steve felt more adrift in this time than he had since waking from the ice. He was given a team, a place to call home, and a job to do, but everything seemed hollow. He only just realized what he was missing. 

Steve held eye contact, watching the hesitation normally kept under lock and key so shockingly on display. “I would now. And I’m always honest.”

Chapter Text

The room they put her in was drafty and damp. Undoubtedly, it violated all sorts of health and safety regulations. It was the most perfect base for perfectly horrible scientists. 

Since arriving at the “Jack-Box”, as some of the guards had referred to it, sleep did not come easily to the girl. The power generators were loud and buzzed incessantly. If the weather was bad outside, and she could always tell by the various leaks in the floor and the maddeningly repetitive dripping from the rafters, the generators would fritz and cause the single light in her room to buzz. 

She often cried instead of sleeping. 

Her tears weren’t born of fear or grief. Ironically, she hadn’t felt as unsafe there as in other places they would ship her. It could’ve been due to the lack of responsibilities she seemed to have or the fact that Doctor List was polite to her against all odds.

Her tears weren’t from dread but from the urge to walk directly into helicopter blades to escape the never-ending sounds. 

They grated on her nerves. The clothes on her back (a grey shirt, the same pair of jeans they picked her up from the Academy in, thread-bare socks) itched. The seams of the shirt pressed against her ribcage when she tried to sleep on the lumpy cot with the decaying blue mattress. Constant adjustment kept her awake, and the lack of rest increased her irritability. Her irritability annoyed the guards, who would turn the light in her room on and off to tell her to shut up, she assumed. The light flashing left after-images in her eyes that gave her an aching headache. 

They didn’t do anything with her for months other than take her vitals once a week and occasionally a blood sample. There was once, about a month into her stay, where they swabbed her mouth and had her urinate in a small container, but never once were any of the tests explained. She never expected an explanation, but it was one of the first times she was kept so isolated from the action that she couldn’t figure out what they were looking for. 

Around two months into her stay, she heard someone crying. The sound woke her from her already unsteady slumber, and with red eyes and a frown traced on her face, she slid her ear against the wall. 

“Please,” a voice cried. It was small and young. It woke her up completely. “I’m sorry. Please. Give him back.”

“Hello?” she called in a quiet voice. “Can you hear me?”

The heavy breathing stopped in the next room. She continued, “My name is Maria, what’s yours?”

Another pause before a voice, much closer than before, said: “James. They took my bear.”

The sounds, the textures, the lights—all of the anger and aggravation they had caused faded away. It left her shaky. Her lips formed a small, pressed grin. “Hi, James. It’s nice to meet you. How old are you?”

A strong sniffle. “Nine. Miss Dee said I was too old for toys and she took him from me when I got out of the c-car.”

A tear she hadn’t known was forming trailed down her cheek to the crease of her nostril, and she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “James, are you listening to me? I want you to listen to me.”

The boy in the next room whimpered in the affirmative. 

“I’ll get us out of here, James,” she promised. “And we’ll find you a new bear. One you can make happy memories with.”

“P-promise?” 

Her head hung low with grief. “I promise.”

“Hey kid, I need you to focus on me,” a voice said, much too close to her face. Her eyes refocused, finding a man nearly a foot from her. His hands pressed on her shoulders. He was very close, too close. Only when she stilled completely to prepare for whatever happened next did she realise she had been shaking. Her breath stuttered in a hastened exhale as her eyes took in the man across from her. As her mind cleared, she recognised him. Barton.

“You’re okay,” he muttered. His rough fingers that were pressing harshly into the muscle of her shoulder relaxed to a firm grasp. “You back with us? You started drifting there.”

She looked to her left, where she had last remembered Tony standing. He was still there, but he wasn’t standing anymore. The man sat on the very edge of a stool, maybe Agent Romanoff’s, and his hands were stressing the blanket fabric beneath her on the bed. 

God , did she seriously just lose it in front of these people? That’s embarrassing .

“Sorry, I’m here,” she confidently declared. Her confidence sounded wobbly and weak in her ears. She smothered a wince. “I’m here. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Tony said. He waved his hand. “Happens.”

Barton finally removed his hands. “We lost you for a minute, there.”

She nodded. Only when a gentle touch landed on her left wrist did she realise she was rubbing circles into her thigh with her closed fist. 

Her eyes followed the hand back to Tony. The man reached into his left pocket, front and back, before awkwardly reaching across his body to his right pocket. His hand emerged with something colored loudly yellow. He set it next to her leg and, after a beat removed his hand from her wrist. 

The alarmingly yellow thing was a rubber ball. She narrowed her eyes, looking back up at Tony. The man had crossed his arms and sat back on the stool in a position that was probably much more comfortable than the one he held before. He nodded at the ball, so she picked it up.

It was surprisingly squishy, and its texture was strange, almost soft. But it was not like the blanket beneath her. She squeezed it. Part of the ball bulged between her fingers and out of her hand. When she released it, it returned to its spherical shape, and her fist tightened around it again.

“Can we talk more about this facility?” Barton asked. “I understand this is stressful, but we really—”

“Of course,” she rushed to say. “I can tell you as much as I know.”

The man nodded, then sat back down on his stool. “You mentioned experiments. Were you the subject or the scientist?”

She squeezed the ball again. “For the first while I was there, they didn’t do much with me. They just took my vitals once a week. Sometimes a blood sample.”

Barton nodded. “Okay. At first, nothing really happened, but something changed, right? What changed?”

They didn’t do anything with her for months.

James, however, was taken out of his room nearly every day. For the first week, he resisted. The sounds of his desperate yells echoed against the hard walls of her room. He cried, and she watched the ripples move in the leak on the floor from the rain. Rage boiled underneath her skin, fighting the knowledge that she couldn’t do anything. While they were feeding her, she hadn’t exercised in weeks. Her body felt weak. Even if she wanted to ram the door down and rescue him, her reflexes wouldn’t be fast enough to disarm a guard before they would both be shot. 

So she listened as they dragged him out of the room for eight days. There was no protest on day nine as they led him from the room.

Every night he returned, she sat with her back against the wall and told him stories. She talked about books she had read in the Academy: Snow White and Lord of the Flies . That last one wasn’t the best, and she stopped halfway through. 

She talked about The Little White Bird . That was the one book she read over and over again when first arriving at the Academy. Specifically, the chapters about Kensington Gardens.

She told him the story of a park in a distant land, where once night fell, and the humans went to bed, the fairies would play, and they would welcome the infant boy who escaped reality, Peter Pan.

“Peter Pan?” the voice from the neighbouring room asked that night.

Her brow furrowed. “Yes. I know his name is strange—”

“I know Peter! My bear’s named after him!”

She was startled. He had never shown any understanding in her previous stories, only asking questions confirming to her that he hadn’t heard them. 

“Oh, yeah?” she asked. “Tell me about Peter.”

Their roles reversed, James avidly spun a magical story of a boy who never aged, who takes Wendy, George and Michael to the world of Neverland. Tales of pirates, mermaids and Indians. 

“I wanna go to Neverland,” James yawned as he spoke nearly an hour into his story. “‘Cause it won’t matter where my mom is. I can be a Lost Boy and fight pirates and fly. And I won’t have to listen no more.”

“I like your Peter Pan,” she said softly. “Maybe we can go to Neverland together.”

At night, she dreamed about a boy in clothes made from tree leaves flying into her room by squeezing in through the vent in the ceiling, taking her hand, and teaching her to fly. 

“It was definitely different,” the girl said, squeezing the ball. “At the Academy, the secrets they tried to keep spread like wildfire once a student got a whiff. But there, I struggled to get any information from anyone. All of the guards were different, and none of them were chatty enough to let anything slip when I was within earshot.

“There was a boy in the room next to me. James. He was young, and I kept listening to them take him from his room every day, but I didn’t know what they were doing with him.” 

Tony inhaled sharply. “The kid, James. You ever see him? Did you talk to him?”

She shook her head. “Like I said, I never actually saw any of the others. I only heard them. James was in the room next to me, and I… I told him stories at night to distract him.”

Barton had the face of a professional, unflinching and unyielding. His eyes, however, spoke at length of his dread. “Distract him from what?”

“Maria,” James’s voice called from his room. She pulled herself from her bed with aching arms, crawling to the shared wall.

“It’s okay, James,” she said. The bruises along the inside of her elbows ached from the needles. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“They told me you asked for it,” he said. The girl didn’t have anything to say. “Why? I don’t understand.”

She sighed, lungs heaving with effort that wasn’t strictly necessary. She felt pressure in her chest. Her body was weak, and her fragile mind began to give way to the dark corners of her consciousness. Lurking in the shadows were abstract concepts that made her uneasy: doubt, uncertainty, fear. 

“When you’re older, James,” she started, hoping her whisper was loud enough for him to hear, “you’ll understand how important it is to protect someone. You’ll meet someone who inspires you or someone you love, and all the pain in the world will be worth it to keep their nightmares away.”

It was silent for a long moment, then, “You’re my Wendy, Maria.”

She hummed in question. 

“Like in the stories,” he said. “Wendy takes care of the Lost Boys, and she protects them. She loves them.”

The girl smiled. “Then you’re the Lost Boy to my Wendy.”

“Yeah,” James said. “And we don’t ever have to grow up.”

Her smile waned, heart aching. Doctor List would arrive in the morning and begin preparing her for his tests. She would be marched from her room to an isolated environment and would have no control over what happens next. In the darkness, her thoughts drifted to whether this is what they meant when they said ‘don’t grow up’—dying young to avoid a worse outcome. 

But she meant what she said: one would do anything in the name of protection. 

“The experiment they were running was strange. It didn’t make any sense from my perspective, but all the scientists involved were fascinated. Doctor List would—”

“Doctor List?” Barton asked, leaning back. “August List?”

Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know his first name. He’s from somewhere with a Germanic dialect, though.”

Barton faced Tony. “August List works for S.H.I.E.L.D. He’s a level six scientist.”

“Those levels mean nothing to me,” Tony said. “Is he dangerous?”

“Yes,” she said. “He may not pose a physical threat, but he has no issues or compunctions with human experimentation, even at the risk of the subject’s life.”

Doctor List visited during the first week of September. He brought a rolling office chair, sat across the room from her, and flipped to a blank page in his small leatherbound notebook.

The German man was formal but never rude to her. “How are you, Maria?”

“My head hurts,” she admitted. She sat still on her measly bed, resisting every urge to rip her hair out just to feel something other than the itching in her ears or the pain in her forehead. 

His eyes narrowed as he looked her up and down. “Are you feeling at all unwell?”

The girl considered lying, saying that her stomach hurt and feigning some kind of virus, but the process of proving her illness and the inevitable punishment for time-wasting behaviour loomed in the distant future. “No, sir. Just a minor headache. I am still functional.”

Functional. Compliant. Agreeable. All things they wanted and required.

The man nodded once. “Then we shall proceed. Today is a big day, Maria. I am excited. You should be as well.”

The girl considered herself observant and intelligent. Although her new situations were painful, she could adapt to them. These traits evolved from survival. These skills enabled her dread to grow due to three observations.

One. Doctor List was calm as he and four guards escorted her from the room down a series of hallways. His stride never wavered, and his hands were lax at his side. He was not concerned with the outcome of whatever was about to happen.

Two. The guards were stiff. The one directly to her left kept glancing back at her as if he were afraid she would make a run for it or possibly drop dead right there in the hallway. They were grunts but knowledgeable enough to know the forthcoming experiment would be dangerous.

Three. They did not blindfold her. They weren’t concerned with whether she saw the route or not. 

These three observations led to one glaring conclusion: she would not survive this experiment.

They stopped at an old metal door in a dark hallway, two flights of stairs below her room. A light on the wall was clearly not original to the building, given the lack of wear along the edge of the casing and the long black cable running down the wall and under the door. One of the guards split off with Doctor List to the right, leaving the remaining guards with her. 

It was quiet, and she knew better than to break the silence. 

“Be honest with me,” she said anyway, “am I walking out of this room today?”

The guard to her left twitched but remained quiet. 

“Got it.”

The light turned red, then green a second later. The guard to her left opened the door for her. She stared at the man’s unremarkable face. He refused to make eye contact. She stepped inside. The door closed behind her.

The room was long and narrow, about as wide as the hallway. There was another door at the far end where the black cable continued towards. There were two cameras in front of her: one on a tripod right next to the door and one in the corner of the far righthand wall. A swift turn revealed another camera directly behind her in the left corner. In the center of the room was a strange stand holding an even stranger staff. It was golden and metallic, with a sharp point at the top and a glowing blue light that hummed. The air smelt sharp and metallic.

“For our records,” a voice spoke from beyond the room, “please state your name and confirm your status.”

The girl’s lip twitched up in a mimicry of a snarl against her better judgment. Doctor List had told her exactly what to say. “Maria Stark. Echidna patient.”

“Approach the sceptre,” the voice spoke.

She nodded stiffly, but her feet were rooted to the ground. She could hear the buzzing of the sceptre. A faint wave of energy pulsed several feet away from the glowing stone at the head. It lightly vibrated against her skin.

Its design was weird, unlike any other weapon she had read about or handled herself. 

And then there were the whispers. She couldn’t understand the words, but she was positive that there were… voices emanating from the sceptre's center, which was concerning, to say the least. 

“Approach the sceptre,” the voice repeated.

She took a step forward.

Nothing happened. 

Another step.

The blue center buzzed, shaking the staff in its stand. Her head tilted, analyzing it.

Abruptly, the blue stone detached from the staff's cradle and hovered in the air. It gradually drifted toward her, illuminating her skin with a chilling glow. 

She reached out to touch it.

A shockwave of energy blasted out of the stone. The light nearly blinded her, and she desperately anchored her feet to the floor to prevent her from falling. The shattered stone fragments reflected the supernatural light coming from the central gem. It was golden instead of blue like it had been before. 

She fought to peel her eyes open, feeling a deep-seated need to see what lay beyond. 

A dark shadow began forming in the center. It was wispy, tenuously folding in on itself as it grew. Her stare intensified, fighting against the energy pushing back on her to watch as it writhed and surged. She could almost make out a figure—

Her body collapsed beneath her, and her vision went dark.

Tony pulled his phone from his pocket, tapping the screen. 

“The sceptre you mentioned,” he asked, “did it look like this?”

He showed her an image, and she nodded. He looked to Barton. “Loki’s sceptre.”

Barton’s lips thinned. “Which we gave to S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“Yup,” Tony said. 

Barton turned to her. “So you came into contact with Loki’s spear of destiny.”

She knitted her brow in confusion. “Spear of destiny?”

He waved his hand in a vague motion. “Nevermind. The point is you touched it.”

She shook her head. “I never got to touch it. I blacked out before I could get too close.”

Tony crossed his arms and leaned back. “I don’t understand that. It never had that effect on us when it was in the lab on the helicarrier.”

The girl faced him. “You were near it?”

“Near it, touched, damn-near enslaved by it,” he shrugged briefly before shooting a glance at Barton, tapping the glowing circle under his clothes. “The arc reactor stopped its effects.”

Barton’s grim expression never wavered. “When Loki attacked, he used that staff to enslave people's minds to do his bidding.”

“Did they survive?” she asked. The archer paused, eyes darting to Tony.

“The mind control didn’t kill them,” Tony said eventually, “but Loki had them do dangerous things at the risk of their own lives. Correlation, not causation.”

“Interesting,” she muttered, squeezing the yellow ball again. “HYDRA must’ve done something to the sceptre after they got it. It didn’t control—” she had a sudden, highly unwelcome thought, “—how would I know if I was being mind controlled?”

Barton gestured with his hands to look him in the eyes. She followed his instructions. “Are your eyes naturally blue?”

“Yes.”

“Are you having any strong desires that aren’t normal?”

Her eyebrows creased. “I don’t think so. Like what?”

“Well, I would assume breaking in here to kill us,” Tony commented. “Or to steal technology to bring back to them. World domination, that sort of thing.”

She shook her head. “Definitely not.”

“Then you’re probably fine.”

It didn’t exactly ease her anxiety, but she shook her head and refocused anyway. “Regardless, whatever they did to it made it lethal. I was the first one to interact with it that I know of, and they kept sending me back in because none of the other subjects were surviving.”

The door opened to reveal Doctor List once again. The girl remained prone on her mattress, trying to stay as still as possible to lessen the ache in her body. 

All week, they took her from her room to draw more blood and do more tests before tossing her used body back into her room to listen to young screams echo from down the hall. She cried the first two days, ran out of tears on day three, and energy on day four. 

Her only saving grace was that they had kept their promise and never touched James. He remained in his room, quiet but listening. 

“I had the pleasure of speaking to an instructor at the Academy,” Doctor List started, eyes glancing around the room with false interest. “She said you had remarkable potential but that you squander it.”

The girl kept her face impassive. “Squander, how?”

“She did not say,” Doctor List said, “but rest assured that ends today. You survived the test. I intend to discover what makes you so special.”

The girl closed her eyes. “You can keep taking my blood and running your tests. You’ll get the same result you’ve been getting over and over again because there is nothing special about me.”

“Dennoch!” the man laughed. It unsettled her. “You are a Stark, and that makes you very special. We will soon yet learn what protected both you and your father from the same fate as others.”

The girl’s head snapped to attention, eyes meeting his. “What do you mean?”

Doctor List gestured for the guards to enter. “We will learn today.”

The small room in the MedLab was quiet, barring the soft hum of the air conditioning. Tony and Barton were having a silent conversation using only expressions. While their conversation wasn’t subtle, she had no idea what they were talking about. 

Eventually, Tony raised his hands. “Don’t look at me! I have no idea.”

Barton scoffed. “That’s a first.”

“If I may, sir,” the voice of the AI cut in. 

“Go ahead, JARVIS.”

The holographic screen reappeared, showing a laboratory space with the Avengers she had met and two others she didn’t recognize. One of them, the small one in purple, must’ve been Dr. Bruce Banner. 

“I reported encountering interferences when in the presence of the sceptre,” JARVIS, said. “Be that as it may, the vitals recorded during your time spent in the lab with the sceptre may be of interest to you.”

Alongside the still image appeared various… readings. The girl knew she was not smart enough or educated enough to make sense of what they were. 

Tony’s eyes squinted. “What am I looking at here, JARVIS?”

“I’m not sure myself, sir,” JARVIS said. “The energy emitting from the sceptre’s power source grew the longer the six of you remained in the room. Unfortunately, I only have statistics for its effect on you, as per your standard biometrics. Beyond the low levels of CMBR, there was an increase in your cortisol levels outside the normal parameters. The progression halted, I believe, in response to a sudden release of oxytocin and vasopressin.”

Tony’s eyebrow twitched. “Excuse me?”

“An empathetic response, sir.”

Barton rubbed a hand over one eye. “Okay, but what does that mean —”

“JARVIS, call the others back,” Tony said, speaking over him. He faced the girl. “Do you know if they tested your hormone levels?”

Her face must’ve been answer enough, as he barely studied her expression before moving on. “I can’t believe I’m saying this— I wish Thor were here.”

Agent Romanoff and Captain Rogers appeared not a second later. Tony spun to face them. “Any chance S.H.I.E.L.D.’s come up with a way to contact Asgard yet?”

Agent Romanoff shook her head, loosely linking her fingers in front of her body. “As far as I know, no.”

Tony cursed under his breath. “Well, we don’t exactly have time to wait, and I certainly don’t have time to figure out how to send AIM messages on an intergalactic scale. I could, just doing it in under three hours may be pushing it.”

Captain Rogers’s face hardened. “Why on earth would we use AIM? Didn’t they just blow up your house?”

Agent Romanoff’s lips quirked in a half-smirk, “It’s an instant messaging service, not the terrorist group.”

Tony rolled his eyes. The girl thought she saw a hint of red flush at the collar of the Captain’s shirt, but she couldn’t be certain. 

Tony waved his hands. “Doesn’t matter. Either way, we don’t have time to waste if there are other kids at the facility. They’re gonna try cleaning house now that she’s escaped.”

Romanoff turned to her, face calm and posture relaxed. “Did we learn how you escaped yet?”

She squeezed the ball tighter, muscles clenched.

They brought her into the room with the sceptre five more times. Each time, she got a little closer to the sceptre before seemingly passing out. Each time was followed by an intensive session in a drafty room set up as a medical wing. Doctors flitted in and out of the room, drawing blood, bone marrow, and who knows what else. They sedated her after an intense bout of vomiting following the third session.

Every night, when she was returned to her room, she slid against the wall and talked to James. 

She stopped hearing any response two days before the sixth session.

The sixth session followed the same pattern. Enter the room. Approach the sceptre. Watch it glow. Hear the voices. Pass out.

This time, she woke up faster than before. She kept her eyes closed as her body slowly came to consciousness, listening to the rustle of lab coats and muffled voices. The light hit her eyelids, and she would have squinted if her eyes had been open. The voices were becoming more clear, and she remained still so as not to draw attention.

“...I don’t understand,” someone, a woman, said. “Not a single variable was changed.”

“Besides the girl,” a male voice replied. “That’s a pretty big variable.”

Something heavy landed on a metal table across the room, followed by the shifting of paper. “Yes, but there is nothing remarkable here.”

The girl gently peeled her eyes open to look at the scientists. Their backs were turned to her as they examined a file on a table about fifteen feet away. They were the only ones in the room. A quick glance at her wrist found her unbound. She scanned the room, holding her breath. 

Luckily, or unluckily, she recognized where she was. It was the medical wing. She was not hooked up to any monitors. The bed, if it could be called that, was pushed against the room's short wall, opposite what she had previously referred to as the ‘pipe wall’. There were dozens of steel pipes running every which way along the back half of the room, presumably from whatever purpose the building served before the Echidna project made it home. There was only one exit in the room: to her left and off-center on a long brick wall framed by two large windows.

A gleam of metal caught her eye, and she turned to face an aluminum over-bed table with an open file. Her gaze shot to the scientists, ensuring their attention remained elsewhere, before leaning over to read the file.

On the left-hand side of the file was a picture she had seen before. The girl in the photograph was no older than five, wearing a black long-sleeved shirt and holding the hand of someone out of frame. She never remembered the moment, but she had seen it enough times to know it was an image of her.

Attached to the top of the picture was a smaller one, roughly the size of a bank card. It was her Echidna intake photograph taken upon her transfer to the Jack-Box. Obviously, this was her file.

МАРИЯ СТАРК

ВОЗРАСТ: 15

ДАТА РОЖДЕНИЯ: 8 ДЕКАБРЯ 1997

ВИД: ЧЕЛОВЕК

MARIA STARK

Age: 15

Date of Birth: 8 December 1997

Species: Human

The girl glanced back at the scientists. They were fortunately enraptured by their discussion and hadn’t noticed her wakefulness. The rest of the file was similarly written in Russian, which struck her as odd. Doctor List was German, or so she had believed. Neither of the scientists had accented voices either. She was suddenly grateful for the years of language classes at the academy. 

Тест шесть: Поведение пациента в отношении скипетра соответствовало предыдущим тестам; пациент приблизился на расстояние 1,2 метра от устройства, после чего быстро потерял сознание. Анализ крови не выявил никаких отклонений.

Test Six: The patient's behavior toward the scepter was consistent with previous tests; the patient approached within 1.2 meters of the device before quickly losing consciousness. Blood analysis revealed no abnormalities.

This was the most she had ever seen of the actual research being performed at the facility. After the third session, she had never woken back up in the medical wing. She had been grateful for the sedation. It meant she hadn’t had to experience the horrible vomiting that burned her throat and brought streams of tears down her face. She couldn’t believe they would be so reckless as not to restrain her or at least sedate her. They just left the file out in the open? It was careless.

Then again, their discussion had never faltered. Whatever issue they were encountering was enough to pull their full attention away from her. Another stolen glance at the doorway showed no one in the hall immediately outside.

The thought struck her, dangerous and tempting: if there was ever a time, it would be now .

She knew from months prior that the medical wing was housed at least one floor below ground level, not far from the central staircase in the center of the building. There was a left turn about twenty feet down the hall and another fifteen before the reinforced stairwell that led to the central hall of the building, something she had only seen once by accident. 

Just as they had strengthened the stairwell, they also fortified the entrance. Both featured deteriorating iron frameworks supported by steel brackets and plating. The door leading outside and whatever lay beyond remained an enigma to her. Nonetheless, the building was aged, and based on the minimal modifications made to suit their needs, they had possibly avoided changing the exterior to prevent drawing attention. If they had taken over a dilapidated, abandoned building, there would probably be some gaps in the structure due to years of neglect.

Her eyes trailed back to the file. She took a risk. Moving unbearably slowly, she flipped to the middle of the file. The papers breathed as they settled in their new position, and she held her breath. The scientists’ conversation remained steady. 

As it turned out, the page she had flipped to had little to do with her. It seemed like a communication record, kind of like the ones from the Cold War she found in the library at the Academy. It didn’t mention her name at all.

And then, she noticed it.

Ходят слухи, что Старк вернулся в здание Stark Industries в Манхэттене после событий в его резиденции в Малибу. Подтверждение ожидается к 2 января 2013 года. Эта информация засекречена как "Фон" до дальнейшего уточнения. Оценка угрозы проводится.

… It is rumored that Stark has returned to the Stark Industries building in Manhattan following the events at his Malibu residence. Confirmation will arrive by 2 Jan 2013. This information is classified Background until determined otherwise. Threat evaluation underway…

Stark. It could only be about the person she had heard so much about yet knew nothing of: Anthony Stark. 

If she was understanding the communique correctly, they’d labeled his return to New York as background knowledge.

To her, this was everything. 

It had been months since she last allowed herself to dream of getting out, years since she fantasized over some kind of fictional reunion with the father she never knew. When she was a child, she told herself a story to help her sleep when the nightmares came. The story always featured a man, much older than herself, telling her everything would be okay. Like Miss Olivia once had, he would scoop her into his lap and hum a familiar tune. He would rock her back and forth, and she would take her small hand and hold tightly onto his tie. It would be easy to fall asleep after that, surrounded by warmth and safety. His baby.

And every morning, she would awake to find that, once again, it had all been a dream. 

But now, she considered the possibility. She wasn’t the small child she once was. She was three years shy of adulthood. There was every possibility in the world the elusive Tony Stark would want nothing to do with her. Every report stated he was an arrogant, callous, narcissistic man. 

She’d believe that if it didn’t make him a perfect fit for HYDRA. Arrogance, callousness, and narcissism were all common traits among the men of HYDRA she had met. If Tony Stark truly embodied these ideals, they would not hesitate to recruit him to the cause. The fact that they viewed him with borderline fear meant he stood against them. And that, alone, was enough to convince her to try. Because even if he didn’t want to parent a troubled teenager, he wouldn’t let her return.

She hoped. 

That still left her with the equation of her escape. Call her foolhardy, but her gut was screaming at her that now was her chance.

She couldn’t predict what would await her after turning the corner outside the medical wing. They could shoot her on sight if they catch her trying to escape. The sliver of ego in her mind gloated that they wouldn’t dare try to kill her, not after expending so much effort in keeping her alive through these tests. She assumed that was the only reason she survived. She was important to them. 

The scientists were still debating. She probably should’ve been at least semi-paying attention to what they were discussing, especially if it had something to do with her bloodwork, but there was no time for that now. 

She glanced at the floor. Concrete. She had socks on her feet. It would help muffle the sound of her footsteps. 

Okay. She took a deep breath, then mentally laid out her plan in simple terms:

1. Quickly but quietly make her way to the door of the medical wing. Hope it’s not heavy, hope it’s not creaky. Slide through without being noticed.
2. Listen for the sound of footsteps. Count the guards in the next hall. If she’s lucky, maybe she will be able to hear the guards on the floor above—

The lights in the medical wing were turned off and replaced by red lights. Emergency lights. Less than a second later, the alarm followed—a loud bleating noise. It bounced off the metal tables, the walls, rattling inside her ribs until she felt sick.

Her heartbeat increased tenfold. Had they already found her out? The scientists immediately paused their conversation upon hearing the alarm. She forced herself back into a prone position, as close as she could remember to how she woke up. Closing her eyes, she silently begged the universe to give her mercy. 

Footsteps rapidly approached the bed. Another set of footsteps was stomping down the hall towards the medical wing.

“You’re needed in containment immediately,” an out-of-breath voice called from the doorway. The doctors stopped approaching her. 

“What’s happened?”

“The staff reacted negatively to Patient Eight,” the voice, presumably a guard, said. “It’s all hands on deck.” Both scientists rushed to the doorway, and suddenly, she was alone.

No fucking way. Her heart pounded in her throat. If this was a trap, she was already caught. But if it wasn’t…

The girl didn’t waste time, considering it was all a set-up. She jumped up from the bed and started for the door. Her fingers curled around the handle. It was cold—so cold it stung. She pressed down slowly, breath caught in her throat. If it creaked—

Honestly, who would hear it over this noise?

The door wasn’t as heavy as she had expected, pushing open easily with a soft groan drowned out by the alarm.

The hallway was bathed in the eerie red hue of the emergency lights. Logically, she knew it was only twenty feet long, but the unsettling, hellish glow made it seem much longer. 

A scream ripped through the facility, sharp and raw. She pressed herself against the wall, her pulse hammering in her ears. It didn’t stop. Her muscles screamed at her to run— move! —but she forced herself to listen first. 

No footsteps. No shouting. Just the blaring alarm and that awful, endless wail.

With her vision blurred, she slid her hand against the wall. She used the wall to guide her trembling body further down the hallway. Under the hellish glow, it stretched impossibly long, twisting in her mind like a fever dream. Every step felt too loud. Every shadow felt like a figure shifting, waiting. The alarm wasn’t just noise anymore—it was pressing against her skull, making her teeth clench. She had to move faster.

Throwing caution to the wind, she sprinted to the end of the corridor, barely catching herself against the corner to scan for guards. The corridor was empty. Ahead, the reinforced staircase gleamed softly, bathed in dim blue light. Further down the hall, past the stairs, the scream grew louder, tearing at her insides. Her heart sank.

It was a child.

A pit of poison opened up in her stomach, and she threw her hand over the lower half of her face, squeezing her eyes shut. Her legs twitched. A step forward. Another. No— no . She caught herself, her hand squeezing the skin around her nose and mouth before the sob could escape. She recognized the pain in that scream. Her own mouth opened, a choked noise escaping the iron lock she had on her voice. She wanted to yell, cry, join in on the scream because she told herself she would protect them. Protect him . She would be their Wendy. 

The crown of her head hit the wall behind her as a gut-wrenching sob wrecked her body backward with the force of trying to hold it in. Her throat tightened as her own scream clawed at her from the inside. Her heart was being torn to shreds. She made a promise that she wasn’t going to be able to keep.

“Wendy stays with the Lost Boys because they need her,” James had said one night. “They need a mother.”

“I like to think she needs them too,” the girl had said in response. “I know I need you.” There was a pause, and then— “...Love is stronger than anything in this world. It’s why these people fear it. It’s why they tear it apart.”

“Even though Peter keeps causing trouble, she still loves him?”

The girl had smiled wanly. “That’s what a mother is supposed to do, I think. They take the pain away so you don’t have to experience it. But they’re also supposed to help you grow up, and that’s what Wendy does. And maybe Peter and the Lost Boys don’t see that as a good thing, but Wendy…”

“Wendy what?”

“...she grew up a long time ago.”

And she did it alone.

The sprint through the last corridor, up the stairs, through the broken window—it didn’t feel real. Her body moved, but she wasn’t in it. Just a vessel, an afterimage of herself. There wasn’t a guard in sight, all seemingly preoccupied with whatever horrors were occurring three flights below her. At some point, probably when squeezing through the broken glass panes and rusted iron bars, she sustained a cut on her hand.

She ran.

She didn’t stop to dry her tears.

She didn’t look back.

That’s what grown-ups did, wasn’t it? 

They didn’t look back.

She had to keep running.

“Because that's what Neverland is—running away, cowardly, without even saying goodbye. It's leaving behind everything you claim to love to embrace purely selfish joy. No responsibilities, no consequences, and nothing ever matters or changes.” — A.C. Wise, Wendy, Darling

Chapter Text

All things considered, it had been a good day for Nick Fury. The last Bill of Lading for Project Insight was waiting on his desk upon his arrival at the Triskellion. Having previously championed the manufacturing process for the helicarrier, he hadn’t been looking forward to the paperwork for the assembly of three more. The biggest secret he learned upon promotion to Director was that every detail, no matter how minuscule or whether he delegated the overall process to someone less interesting, had to be run by him for approval. Hundreds of forms needed signing, and while it was far from over, this would be the last one regarding this particular project for the time being. He would take that win in stride. 

His signature was important, especially when it came to the transfer of people rather than materials. The situation on the Moldovan/Sokovian border had become too dangerous to allow his agent to stay on the inside, and at about eleven AM, a file was emailed to his tablet, just waiting to be signed to bring that agent back home without causing an international incident. That form meant the agent was already on the tarmac, awaiting his approval to evacuate. Fury signed without hesitation—if the extraction had gone sideways, he would’ve heard about it by now.

What he was hearing about, however, kept bringing a smile to his face, a sight certain to cause the rookies to quake in their boots. 

It was an open secret that one particularly overconfident agent had taken an interest in Maria Hill. What wasn’t as well known was that Fury had been keeping track—strictly for amusement, of course. Hill had patience in abundance, but she also had a breaking point, and every day this poor fool kept pushing his luck, he inched closer to finding it. The office pool had been running for weeks, silent bets placed on when she’d finally put him in his place.

If Fury had placed a bet, he’d have given it four more days. 

“You think this is funny, don’t you?” Hill said, closing the office door behind her. His chuckles were answer enough. “This could be considered sexual misconduct in the workplace.”

“So?” Fury harped, sitting in his chair and spinning to face his agent, “take it up with HR.”

Hill’s face flattened. “He is in HR, sir.”

“Secure office,” Fury said, pulling his phone from his back pocket and setting it on the desk. The windows were tinted to block out the little light left in the day. The sun had set over an hour ago as it was.

He leaned his elbows onto his desk. “Did you want me to interfere, Agent Hill?”

Hill rolled her eyes. “No, sir.”

An alert appeared on the display behind her head, and whatever brevity he had was wiped from his face.

“What the hell…”

Hill approached the screen and expanded the alert. “This just came in—Brooklyn, twenty minutes ago. A passerby caught a glimpse of Stark and Rogers. There are unconfirmed reports of others.”

Fury’s eye held intense focus on the alert, trying to keep his brain moving. Several days ago, he had seen another email requesting his signature cross his inbox, one that stood out from the others due to its sender: Tony Stark. The email was titled “Formal Request: Avengers Housing Initiative (You’re Welcome).”

It was a form—technically a DD Form 1746, the kind military personnel used to request housing assignments. Except this one had been… creatively repurposed. The header still bore the Department of Defense branding, but the fields were a mess of Stark’s edits. Under “Applicant Information,” he’d listed “The Avengers (Collective), c/o Tony Stark, Genius/Billionaire/Philanthropist.” For “Desired Installation,” he’d scratched out the original options and typed “Stark Tower, NYC—because it’s better than your floating fortress.” The “Dependent Data” section simply read, “Depends on the day—ask Rogers if he’s feeling needy.”

Fury had almost deleted it on sight—Stark was an expert at bending bureaucracy to his will until it was unrecognizable. But he’d skimmed it if only to see how far the man’s ego could stretch a PDF. The remarks section was the kicker: “Per S.H.I.E.L.D. Directive 616 (I made that up), centralized housing enhances operational efficiency. P.S. I’m billing you for the Hulk-proof drywall.”

He had only signed it knowing that the Avengers under one roof would lead to some strange approximation of found family between them, one he could possibly use in the future. A bargaining chip.

Stark’s brainchild had been official for just over a week, and trouble had moved in faster than Thor with a U-Haul.

If Stark’s involved, it’s not quiet work. If Rogers is involved, it’s not selfish work. Together? That’s a mission.

“I thought the Avengers were currently inactive?” Hill’s voice cut through his thoughts. 

“Technically, they’re on retainer until we need them,” he said, pressing the tips of his fingers together. 

“Did you send them out?” she asked. “I thought Phil was—”

“Obviously, he was,” he interrupted. “And things changed.”

“Sir, do they know—”

“They do not,” he said, pinning his one-eyed glare on her. “And that will continue to be the case until I deem it necessary.”

The alert, which had been beeping steadily since appearing on the interface, was silenced by a rough jab at his keyboard.

“Should I have someone shadow them, sir?”

Fury shakes his head, watching the alert with obsessive intensity. “Too late for that. Whoever saw them first isn’t the only one watching them by now.” He leaned back in his chair. “What’s local PD saying?”

Hill expands a file on the interface, reading closely. “Two calls to NYPD, one of their guys reported it to us. They’re waiting on us before responding. For once.”

Fury exhaled once before standing abruptly. “Pull satellite. If they’re still in motion, I want to know where they’re going.”

Hill grabbed a tablet from the desk as he rounded the front. “Sir, are we planning on stopping them?”

He let the question hang—until Hill stopped, waiting, holding back the satellite feed. “No. We want to know why they’re moving in the first place.”

There was a reason Maria Hill shot through the ranks to his side so quickly. She took orders well and was incredibly competent and skilled, but there was an edge to her expression that counted in times like these. It challenged him, threatened his orders. “Get me everything happening in Brooklyn in the last forty-eight hours. I want to know everything—muggings, break-ins, a stone falling into the river. If it happened, I want to know about it. If this isn’t a coincidence, I want to know what they’re chasing.”

“Understood, sir.”

Hill guided the satellite program with added parameters to pick up energy emissions from the Iron Man suit or the quinjet Natasha was still in possession of. He had known better than to ask for it back. 

“Pedestrian reports mentioned an abandoned building on the Brooklyn Bay.” 

“Zoom in,” he commanded. He walked closer to the interface, getting up close and personal with the pixelated image of a brick-and-mortar warehouse with a smokestack.

“What do we know about this building?”

Hill tapped her tablet rapidly. “Sending the address to level 5 to see if they can get some information.”

He faced her, expression unamused. “What about what you can tell me?”

Hill hesitated, then threw a webpage called ‘Atlas Obscura’ on the screen.

“What… is a public web browser doing on my secure network.”

Hill shifted on the spot. “The only information that comes up when I search the address is this.”

Fury pressed his lips together, reading the page. It was lackluster at best, with very little information other than “yes, it exists.”

A knock sounded at the door to the office. Fury called them in, and in walked a nervy-looking agent who definitely graduated from Sci-Ops, and probably not all that long ago. 

“Um, sir,” he stuttered, white fists clenching his tablet. “I was told to bring you all-all the information on anything happening in Brooklyn for the last forty-eight hours—”

“Yes, I know,” Fury said, patience running thin. “What have you found?”

The agent cleared his throat and held out his tablet. “I hope you’re able to find a connection to something specific because, just looking at it all, none of it stands out.”

The agent was right. If anything, the only thing suspicious was how exceedingly normal the report was.

Fury handed the tablet back. “Keep looking.”

The agent nodded quickly. “Yes, sir.” He hurried from the room, closing the door behind him.

Fury marched over to his desk. His phone was still sitting next to the keyboard. He snatched it up and moved to leave the room.

“Dig deeper,” Fury instructed Hill as she followed him. “Find out everything you can about that building.”

They reached the elevator, but Fury kept walking. 

“Sir?”

“I’m going to make a call.”

He pushed open the door to the stairwell and took the briefest of moments to just think.

It was another thing no one warned him about when he assumed the position of Director: the constant need to balance transparency and deception. It wasn’t just about classified information or national security. It was about people. About what they needed to hear versus what they could handle. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were trained to follow orders, to trust the system, but trust required something in return. Too much secrecy, and you lost loyalty. Too much truth, and you lost control.

The people under him didn’t just need answers; they expected them. Hill, Hand, Gonzales—seasoned operatives who could read between the lines. The rookies, still green, watching him like he was some immovable force of certainty. Even the World Security Council, with their demands and their politics, expected him to have an explanation for everything.

Therein lies the rub.

Because no one ever told you what to do when you didn’t have the answer. When the pieces weren’t aligning, and the smartest play was to wait and watch. When the people who were supposed to be your assets had stopped reporting in and started acting on their own.

It had started as a contingency plan. The Avengers Initiative wasn’t about heroism or inspiration—it was about control. About having a card to play when the world threw something at them too big for any government or army to handle. Something that couldn’t be contained by normal means.

They were supposed to be an asset. A resource. Dangerous, yes, but manageable. 

Except now they weren’t.

Now, they were making decisions without him. Moving without orders. Following their own instincts instead of the chain of command. 

That wasn’t how this was supposed to work.

And it was happening way earlier than he expected it to.

Fury wasn’t arrogant enough to think he could hold a leash on all of them, not permanently. But this—this felt like the first step toward something else. Something no one, not even him, had accounted for.

And if the Avengers were no longer in his hand…

Then who the hell was holding the cards?

He pushed off the wall and continued down the stairwell. He opened his contacts, pressing a single name.

The line rang almost to completion before being answered on the other end.

“Rogers.”

“Brooklyn’s a good place for a jog. Though I have to admit, if you were aiming to refamiliarize yourself with your borough, after dark is an awfully strange time to do it.”

There was a pause, before— “Nothing like that. We’re working on the whole team thing. You know, building trust.”

“Trust’s good. I’m a fan of that. Usually goes both ways, though.” The other line was silent except for the slight crackle of the Captain’s breathing. “So, what’s in Brooklyn?”

“Right now? Just us. Sorting things out on our own terms. And we’ll stay that way unless we’re needed for something bigger.”

Meaning they wanted off active duty. Not just a break. Not just breathing room. A deliberate, conscious step away from S.H.I.E.L.D. oversight. A choice—one Rogers had the nerve to present as a given, not a request.

“You realize that’s a little hard for me to swallow, right? Keeping S.H.I.E.L.D. in the dark usually doesn’t end well.”

“Not trying to keep you in the dark, Nick. Just trying to make sure we’re on the same page before it matters.”

Fury inhaled sharply. The connotation was clear, even with Rogers dancing around it. They were distancing themselves from S.H.I.E.L.D. for whatever reason, and in the four weeks since he had last spoken to Steve Rogers, the man had learned subtext and executed it effectively.

“Unless you think the team getting on the same page is a problem, Director?”

“I don’t like playing catch-up, Rogers,” Fury stated plainly. “Never have. And last I checked, ‘sorting things out’ wasn’t in your job description.”

“We’re not trying to make trouble, Nick,” Rogers sighed over the line. “Just doing what we were put together to do—help people. And right now, the best way we can do that is by making sure we can trust each other first. We’ll be there when it counts. But for now, we’ll call you when we need you.”

“When you need me ,” Fury huffed. Rogers was annoyingly silent on the other end, and Fury felt too frustrated to wait for him to give up the ghost first. “You better hope you don’t need me before I need you.”

He ended the call sharply, continuing his march down the stairwell until he approached a door, finding himself on the eleventh floor. At some point unknown to him, he found himself locked into a seat at a poker game where he couldn’t see the other players.

I had a full deck once. Now, I’m not sure I’m even holding a pair.

The hallway was busy as he walked through the door, heads turning to look at his intimidating stature move with purpose down the hall toward the elevator, raising his phone to his ear again as the doors closed.

“Hill.”

“Meet me on the tarmac,” he ordered. “We’re going to Brooklyn.”

Chapter Text

The world of the 21st century was unfamiliar and unnerving, but some things stayed the same no matter how much time passed. Coffee, while there were infinitely more options than in the ‘30s, still retained that earthly scent he remembered his Ma loving so much.

Luckily, New York hadn’t lost that bite of cold brought by the winter months. The inescapable cold crept between his rough sheets at night and rattled his weak bones with a freeze fit for the ice age. That bitter wind still stung his face, but his body naturally ran at a higher temperature after the serum and couldn’t penetrate the thick leather of his suit.

Thank God for small victories, he thought while adjusting the belt on his suit pants. The feel of leather had also stayed relatively the same.

There were little things, though, that reminded him he wasn’t home—not really. Not anymore. Things like the smell of gunpowder had changed—still sharp and chemical, but with a smoother, almost plasticky note compared to the rougher, greasier whiff of cordite. The explosions sounded different, too. Sharper. Cleaner. Like war had become more about precision than grit.

The air itself tasted different in the mornings.

Everything was faster now. Sharper around the edges. Even silence didn’t feel like silence anymore—not with the quiet hum of machines running in every corner, the background buzz of air conditioners and data banks, and the ever-present static in his earpiece.

The people were louder but said less. Smiles didn’t reach eyes as often as they used to. Posture was slouched, attention divided. He missed stillness. Missed people looking each other in the eye when they talked. 

Everything was louder and more crowded, yet more isolating. And everyone, everywhere, was tired.

Even heroes.

He stood just inside the bay of the quinjet as his team trickled in—boots on metal, the low groan of the hatch shifting closed behind them. Each step carried more weight than gear alone.

Stark was first. He didn’t speak, just gave Steve a nod as he passed, already pulling up projections on the interior screen, fingers moving quickly, almost too quickly. Stark moved like someone trying to outrun his own thoughts. 

It was also the first time Steve had seen the Iron Man suit since the Chitauri invasion. Something about it had most certainly changed.

Natasha followed soon after, her expression unreadable but her gait confident. She didn’t make eye contact, but she didn’t need to. Her silence wasn’t avoidance—it was focus.

And Clint—Clint lingered at the edge. He wasn’t coming with them, though he was dressed like he was ready for a fight. He had volunteered to stay behind to keep an eye on the girl. His arms were crossed, leaning against the frame of the hatch, eyes scanning the team without a word. Watching them board like he didn’t want to let them out of his sight.

That made two of them.

Steve watched all of it. Took it in like a computer download, but felt it like a gut punch. They were each fractured in their own ways. Worn down from different battles. But when it came time to show up, they did. No questions asked. No complaints. Just quiet determination.

And he wasn’t blind. He knew they were watching him, too.

The weight of leadership had never felt so personal. This mission wasn’t just about finishing the fight the girl had started. It was about reclaiming something for all of them.

He stepped up the ramp and into the jet, drawing in a breath that tasted like cold metal and resolve.

“Alright,” he said, glancing around the space as the engines warmed. “Here’s the plan.”

Wordlessly, everyone crowded around the center console. Stark hit some buttons on the panel to bring up a projection of the building with a map of the area. Once satisfied, he faced Steve with an intensity that reminded him of the moments after Phil Coulson’s death. There was an undercurrent of anger rumbling behind the whiskey-colour of his eyes. It wasn’t directed at Steve. 

Tony was channeling his fear and anger into focus. He looked to Steve for leadership. Tony let his grip on the reins relax and gave it to him—to guide, to lead. He didn’t look him in the eyes.

Steve heaved in a deep breath, exhaling any doubt and uncertainty. It had no room here. 

“We’ll land on the wharf, about half a mile out. We go in quiet.”

Steve looked at Natasha. “Nat and I will move in on foot. Ground level.”

The woman nodded once, her eyes locked onto the projection. Her arms were loose at her sides, and there was no wasted movement. The assassin had narrowed any of the emotions they had discussed in that office to a needle-point precise anchor.

She was already on the ground in her head. Already clearing rooms. There was comfort in her certainty.

She didn’t need direction. She just needed the green light.

“Stark, you’ll take aerial—scan the place before you punch through.”

Tony manipulated the building projection to view the roof and then reset it. “I’ll do a thermal sweep from above. If there’s someone breathing in there, I’ll find them.”

He stepped back, hands falling to the sides of his armor. “...Assuming they didn’t wrap the place in lead or whatever paranoid bunker tech they’re into these days.”

The sarcasm was thinner than usual. Like he was trying to lighten the air around a loaded gun. Steve didn’t smile, but he let the remark pass. The tension in Tony’s voice was starting to fray—just a little. Enough to worry him.

“If it’s been scrubbed, we’ll know fast,” Natasha stated plainly. “But if it hasn’t, we start at the bottom, sweep each floor.”

Her eyes drifted to the man in armor, “No one splits until the building is cleared.”

Steve cut in before Tony could push back. “We’re not there to clean house. If there’s anyone inside, we detain, not neutralize. We need answers. People. Weapons. Proof.”

Tony nodded once. “My focus is the kids, Cap. That’s the only thing I will be focusing on.”

Not a request. A warning. Steve felt the words hit like a strike to the ribs—controlled, precise, but bruising all the same. Because if Tony let himself go hunting, there’d be no one left to interrogate.

“Fast and quiet,” Steve agreed. “No mistakes.”

Natasha tapped the projection with surgical precision. “We’ve got a ten-minute window before SHIELD’s satellite drifts and alerts Fury. Let’s use it.”

Clint eased back from the group, his boots light on the ramp. “I’ll stay with Maria—”

“Don’t call her that,” Natasha corrected. Clint sucked his lips into a thin line.

“We need to talk about this whole name thing when you all get back,” he said, eyes locked on Tony, who stayed focused on the projection. 

“Watch her closely,” Steve instructed. It wasn’t a dismissal, per se, but he needed to redirect his focus to the job at hand. The naming issue could be handled later. 

Still, Natasha had corrected them twice now on the usage of the girl’s given name. It was as if she was championing the child’s right to… what? Identity? The girl had said she didn’t like the name, and Natasha seemed to take that as law. He didn’t understand, but his strategic mind told him to box it up for later and focus on the task.

Natasha marched to the cockpit without another word. At her movement, Clint stepped fully off the loading ramp, allowing the closing sequence to start up.

Steve caught Clint’s eye right before the door closed all the way. The man had a stony expression, not unlike everyone else’s. If Clint hadn’t volunteered to stay behind, he would’ve guaranteed that look meant he was ready for battle.

Tony didn’t move from the center console when Natasha lifted the bird into the air. The sight was unnerving. Steve hadn’t spent much time with the man since meeting him, but he had noted that Tony Stark was rarely ever still. If he wasn’t twirling a screwdriver, he was snapping his fingers, fiddling with a wrapper, or gesturing emphatically. 

The only movement from the man was the clench of his jaw like he was chewing on steel.

Out of the three of them, Tony was the only one who hadn’t signed up for this kind of work. Steve was used to running missions for the Army, then S.H.I.E.L.D. after the Chitauri invasion. Natasha and Clint had been operatives for most of their lives. 

But Tony? At the end of the day, he was a civilian. A man who built weapons and then tried to erase them. A man who just learned he had a daughter—one who had been held captive her entire life while he was out drinking, spiraling, trying to forget the pieces he’d left behind.

That thought made him pause. It was as if the air had left his lungs in a single sharp and sudden exhale. That creeping, hollow dread settled in the pit of his stomach and refused to move.

They weren’t only fighting HYDRA. They were fighting kidnappers. Abusers.

And Tony had stepped up—without orders, without training—to walk straight into that nightmare.

It took something out of you to face the darkest corners of humanity and claw your way back out with someone else's life in your hands.

This was the work Steve had signed up for. Natasha, too.

But Tony Stark had walked into the fire anyway.

Steve had never imagined himself as someone who’d have kids. There was a moment, brief as it was, when the Howling Commandos had returned from another mission and Peggy greeted him on his return. They hadn’t kissed—things had still been a little awkward since that moment in the barracks, but the relief in her eyes was real, along with the sense of peace that settled over him despite the war happening around him. 

Peggy in front of him, Bucky at his side.

It was the only time he ever considered the future after the war was over.

He hadn’t let his mind wander too far during those years. Out in the field, distraction got people killed. So he kept his thoughts locked down, boots on the ground, focused on the next fight. Not some fictional domestic future that only existed if they won. There was never room to think about what would happen if they lost.

But here, now, inside the hum of the quinjet and with the weight of Tony’s pain lodged in his chest, Steve let himself imagine it.

A house in Brooklyn. Front yard. Maybe Flatbush, near Ditmas Park. Enough room for three people and a spare room for Bucky’s sister if she ever wanted a break from the city.

There weren’t any kids in that fantasy.

But now, he could picture them. Kids on the lawn. Grass stains on their shirts, scrapes on their knees. That joyful, wild energy of childhood, unburdened by war or fear.

And then, in an instant, he imagined someone taking that away from him.

He had to shut the thought down immediately.

Just the barest flicker of that nightmare—of someone taking his child, his family—was enough to make his fists curl. The leather glove on his right hand creaked. Then, split open at the seam.

“Cap, you good?” 

Steve’s head snapped down to his fist. The leather had torn across the knuckles; the seam split open like a pressure valve finally giving out. Frayed stitches curled outward like the remnants of what minor protection the gloves provided. He flexed his fingers once, slowly. The glove didn’t resist anymore.

He looked up at Tony, whose eyes were bouncing between his face and his fists. Steve wished he wasn’t wearing the armor. It was hard to gauge his body language when he couldn’t see the minor shifts in his position. 

“That’s S.H.I.E.L.D. equipment at its best,” the man said, gesturing at his broken glove.

Steve undid the clasps around his wrists and slid them off. He held them loosely for a moment before tucking them into a pocket on his pants. 

“Prepare for landing,” Natasha called, switching on the landing gear. 

It was barely a five-minute flight, and still, it felt like it took forever to touch the ground. 

The landing was smooth, and Steve saw Tony activate the suit helmet. His eyes were now hidden behind menacing glowing slits.

“We’re down,” Natasha said. She hit a button on the console, and the back ramp lowered slowly with a hydraulic hiss. “Ten minutes. Move.”

She didn’t wait for either of them or the ramp to fully hit the ground before slinking into the dark wharf. Steve immediately stepped into stride behind her, taking in the deserted breakwater.

The concrete was old and cracked beneath their feet, and judging by the sound of the waves against the breakwater, pieces were broken off into the harbor. It was obvious the area had fallen into disrepair. If Steve hadn’t been confident in the internal stabilization of the quinjet, he’d be worried about the weight of the machine sinking back into the earth.

They moved silently down the breakwater, careful not to slide along the broken concrete.

Steve had a vague sense of familiarity. If he remembered correctly, they weren’t too far from an old Navy Harbor Unit. He never went there after getting the serum, but he had known about it while trying to enlist.

A soft whir of repulsors echoed behind them as the Iron Man suit shot into the sky. The suit moved so fast that the unknowing eye could very well mistake it for a drone or maybe even a comet. He almost allowed himself to scoff, as if any New Yorker worth their salt would believe they saw stars in this day and age with all the light pollution. 

There was a crack to his right, and he reached out on instinct, catching Natasha’s elbow before she could slide down the side of a ruptured concrete slab. The small piece had shifted under her weight, revealing forgotten tree roots beneath the surface. It made the stone very unstable. 

They made eye contact. The near-miss hadn’t phased her on the outside, and he let go once she tapped his hand. She was, however, more careful where she stepped as they continued on.

Once they were nearly at the wharf, he spotted the building they sought. It was unassuming, and its exterior's general decay blended in well with the decrepit nature of the entire bay. 

“I’ve got no heat signatures,” Tony’s voice came through the comms. “Doesn’t mean they’ve cleaned house, but it’s not looking good.”

Steve touched his communications earpiece on instinct to respond. “We’re two minutes out from the building, Stark. Wait for my go-ahead.”

“Uh, sorry, Cap,” Tony said. There was the sound of a repulsor whirring to life. “Can’t hear you over the sound of this metal door flying off its hinges.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve could’ve sworn he saw Natasha smother a smirk. 

Steve stopped at the edge of the overgrown breakwater. Something caught his eye in the grass by the concrete steps—

A faded teddy bear, face-down in the grass.

It was grass-stained, one button eye missing, the other barely hanging on by a thread.

Natasha’s gait faltered. He glanced at her and saw her eyes locked onto the bear.

At that moment, Steve recognized how incredibly important it was to maintain strategic objectivity to get the job done. He could come back and inspect it later.

The building's front door was a painted steel door, which he found odd. It seemed as if they had put in the effort to weather it so that an average passerby wouldn’t be able to tell it was new.

The shield efficiently severed the door's hinges. Natasha’s quick hands caught the metal before it hit the floor, gently lowering it. He stepped over the debris with his shield raised. He sensed Natasha fall in line to his right, gun at the ready. 

To the left of the room was a staircase that descended into darkness. The building appeared to be decaying, with no light sources visible inside. Graffiti covered the walls, and rusted metal stairs ascended to the upper floors. 

It was very quiet. 

The only noise to break through the suffocating silence was the approaching Iron Man suit hovering above the metal stairs. The suit landed a few paces ahead of them on the ground floor.

“The stairs weren’t stable enough to hold the weight of the suit,” Tony’s voice spoke in his ear. He noticed the sound didn’t come from the suit’s speakers. 

Natasha motioned to start the descent. 

The Iron Man suit took a step forward and then paused. Steve had reached for the flashlight on his belt when an idea struck him.

“Stark first,” he instructed quietly. “Light the way.”

The man needed no further direction before moving. 

The descending staircase was likely an addition to the building, given the color change of the concrete. The graffiti disappeared, leaving behind water stains and pipes. 

The Iron Man suit emitted a haunting blue light along the first hallway. He moved with the gauntlet raised, casting hard-edged shadows as they went. The corridor branched into two paths: one sloping downwards and the other turning left. 

Natasha flicked on the flashlight attached to her gun and nodded to the left hallway. Without a word, she veered off on her own.

Tony and Steve ventured deeper into the building.  The air grew colder, heavier. Damp. The concrete walls around them were barren—no weapon caches, no loose wiring, no trace of high-level tech. It didn’t even feel abandoned so much as emptied , like the shell of something stripped clean.

The third lower level had shorter ceilings and a line of metal doors along the right-hand side. Unlike the rusted piping that snaked through the rest of the building, these were new, recent, like the front door.

There were no handles—just solid steel plates with narrow deadbolt keyholes.

“Those are electromechanical detention locks,” Tony muttered. “This is where they kept them.”

Steve’s pulse quickened. He stood back as Tony used his gauntlet to fire a pinpoint laser at the lock’s edge. Sparks flared. The smell of scorched metal clung to the air.

The door swung open with ease when he finished, revealing an empty room. 

They moved door to door—six in total—finding the same setup in each one: a cot with a thin blue mattress, a single cotton blanket, and a drain built into the floor. Water stains streaked the walls, and in some rooms, water dripped steadily from ceiling cracks.

Each one was empty.

Each one had been lived in.

He didn’t want to think about how many small backs had curled up on those mattresses or whether any of them had something like that bear—something to hold onto.

In the last room, farthest from the ascending stairs, Steve knelt beside the mattress. The stillness of this room felt different, as if something had ended here.

The blanket had been folded with care and placed neatly at the foot of the cot. He ran his fingers over it, finding it far worse than the wool blankets the military handed out. It was thin and scratchy. 

He spotted the marking when putting the blanket down. 

Etched faintly into the concrete, barely there, was a scratch-marked message: 

Lost Boy + Wendy.

His breath caught. He didn’t move for a moment.

The bear.

He saw it again—not in the grass now, but tucked against a child’s side, one button eye barely hanging on.

A hundred unspoken thoughts stormed his mind, none of them fully formed. But the gut feeling he’d had since they stepped into the building—the hollow wrongness of it all—finally crystallized.

“Tony…” his voice was faint even in his own ears. He felt more than heard the heavy boots of the Iron Man suit enter the room. 

Tony entered the room slowly. The arc reactor’s glow cast long shadows across the floor.

He didn’t speak.

Steve didn’t either.

The mechanical whir of the suit’s movements quieted as he stepped closer, reading the scratched words on the wall.

Tony moved closer, his helmet retracting. Steve watched as his gaze tracked the carving, then the folded blanket, then, as if connecting an invisible thread, flicked back toward the hallway. Toward the empty rooms. The ones with rumpled, discarded blankets. Without care.

It didn’t take long.

Steve saw it in the way Tony's gauntlet dropped an inch. In the way his body stilled—not with tension, but with understanding. A horrible, nauseating understanding.

The silence said it all.

This had been her cell.

Or worse—this had belonged to the boy she’d promised to protect.

One of them didn’t make it.

And this one—this small, cold room—might’ve belonged to the girl who did.

The faint tread of boots approached down the hall — lighter than the Iron Man suit, more deliberate than Steve’s own. He didn’t need to turn to know it was Natasha.

She appeared in the doorway, gun lowered now but still in hand, her expression unreadable in the low light.

“Found anything?” she asked, scanning the room quickly. Her eyes landed on the blanket, then the faint carving on the wall. She stepped forward.

Steve stood up slowly, backing out of her way. Tony hadn’t moved from where he was standing, helmet still off, gaze fixed on the carved words like they might rearrange if he stared hard enough.

Natasha crouched beside the bed and ran a gloved hand over the folded blanket. She holstered her weapon.

“Someone took care with this,” she murmured, more to herself than them.

She touched the edge of the carving next — Lost Boy + Wendy — and her brow furrowed. “This one hers?” she asked, glancing back at Steve.

“I don’t know,” Steve replied. But he did. And Tony did too.

That made her go still. The only movement was her thumb brushing faintly over the carved lines in the wall. Steve glanced back just in time to catch it—the faint flicker of something in her eyes. Concern, sorrow, but also a stirring. Something Steve couldn’t name.

“Think the bear outside was hers?” she asked.

Tony’s head snapped to her. “Bear?”

Steve gazed warily at Tony. “There was a toy bear in the grass outside—”

“It’s James’s,” the man interrupted. “It was the boy she talked about. The one she… had to leave behind.”

Then Natasha added, more to herself than them, “She must’ve folded the blanket.”

Her voice was quieter now. Not soft, not sentimental—just certain.

Steve didn’t miss the shift. And neither, he suspected, did Tony. He couldn’t see what Natasha had determined, didn’t understand what she spotted to be so sure that this was Maria’s cell rather than the boy’s, but it was, at least, a comforting idea that the person who slept in this room made it out alive.

And then Natasha, almost absently, stepped forward and adjusted the folded blanket, straightening the edge so it lined up perfectly. Her fingers lingered a moment. She didn’t seem to realize she’d done it.

Steve saw it, though, and he filed it away.

They swept the last of the interior with precision. The remains of the old facility had been gutted and converted, but much of it now stood bare. A few beds where HYDRA agents must have slept, a sealed chamber where Steve suspected the sceptre had once been stored—cold, clinical, stripped of anything that might've held meaning. Natasha had found the abandoned medical bay and said nothing about it, just returned with her expression unreadable and jaw set tight. There wasn’t much left here but ghosts.

They regrouped in silence.

Outside, the sky transformed into a rich, velvety blue that only winter could create. Frost clung to the edges of the crumbling stairwell. Steve stepped out last, the soft creak of rusted metal under his boots the only sound for several seconds.

Then his eyes caught it again.

Recumbent in the overgrown grass, in the same spot it had been when they arrived, the teddy bear hadn’t moved. Grass-stained. One eye missing. The other was dangling like it had given up holding on. The wind stirred the frayed stitching near its shoulder, lifting the ear like a wave goodbye.

Steve approached it slowly. He hadn’t let himself linger earlier. There’d been too much to focus on, too much ingrained protocol—too many variables to account for. But now, with the building empty behind him and the dark closing in around them, he crouched beside it.

It was smaller than he’d expected. Dirt had long since soaked into the fabric, and the patch where the heart might’ve been was threadbare. It had once been tan, maybe. Now it was a murky brown-green, dull with time. He didn’t need to ask who it belonged to.

He reached out and picked it up, brushing away the frost with his thumb. The stuffing was lopsided, and the seams stretched, but he held it like something sacred—carefully, reverently, like he was afraid it would fall apart if he gripped too tightly.

The bear had belonged to a boy they’d never meet. A boy Tony’s daughter had tried to protect. A boy who must’ve clung to this bear as the last piece of a world he barely remembered. And HYDRA took it from him the second he arrived.

Steve exhaled slowly.

Clint and Tony had told them what the girl had said about the boy next door, the one she made herself responsible for. She was only a child herself. 

Not for the first time, Steve’s thoughts turned inward, to a future he never got to have. A family he never raised. A daughter with Peggy’s laugh and his stubborn streak. What if it had been her?

He stood, the bear tucked carefully in his hand, and looked back toward the structure. His shield was still slung across his back, but it felt heavier now. All of his uniform did.

He remembered how sharply he’d spoken to the girl only an hour or so prior. How ready he’d been to doubt. The vacant fear in her eyes when she’d flinched from him—Steve hadn’t missed it. It had stayed with him since.

He’d been so sure it was the right move. Interrogate. Validate. Confirm the threat. But it hadn’t been a threat sitting in that Tower—it had been a kid. And it took every ounce of control he had not to crumble under the guilt.

“We were too late,” he murmured, not to anyone in particular. Maybe not even aloud.

He looked down at the bear again, then back to where Natasha stood near the Quinjet, silent and unreadable. Tony stood further off, watching the building, gauntlet still faintly glowing at his side. This had shaken him. Steve didn’t have kids. Tony now did. And this place was where they’d kept her—eight months behind steel and concrete, without warmth, without comfort.

Without this.

Grass stains belonged on jeans, on knees from playing too hard and expending too much energy creating imaginary worlds with no consequences. They were supposed to be a sign of childhood. The stains on this bear meant something very different.

Steve looked back down at the little bear in his hand, and something solidified inside him.

She might’ve gotten out. But she’d never had a childhood, not really. No warm bed. No birthday cake. No toys. Nothing soft or safe. No one to fight for her.

Until now.

He wrapped the bear gently in a cloth from his pack, tucked it under his arm like a shield he hadn't known he needed to carry, and walked toward the jet. There was no undoing what had happened in that facility. But there was a girl in the tower who still had a future—and Steve Rogers would be damned before he let the past take anything more from her.

Chapter Text

“They’re back,” Barton’s voice came from the doorway of the medical room. His face was open and calm, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth. It was a contrast to his serious but impassive demeanour from before. He had pulled back part of the privacy curtain. “Want to wait here or join me?”

Ever since the others had left to search the Jack-Box, Barton had been drifting in and out of the room. He never stayed too long or pushed her to talk. Sometimes he’d come in and scroll through his phone silently, lounging on the nearby stool like he had nothing better to do. Other times, he’d ask if she wanted to lie down, or if she wanted to take off her shoes. Once, he brought her a glass of water with a striped red and white straw tucked into the side.

She hadn’t touched it right away.

Drinks were riskier than food—liquids were easier to drug. She’d learned that the hard way. But she figured if they’d wanted to sedate her, they would’ve done it already. They hadn’t laced the chicken from earlier, and she was still sharp, still clear. It was a calculated risk. Eventually, she took a sip.

Barton hadn’t reacted either way. He didn’t watch her for a reaction or seem to care whether she drank or not. He just sat nearby, steady and quiet.

He had a different rhythm than the others. Less performative than Mr. Stark, less intimidating than the Captain. There was something about his presence that felt low to the ground. 

He didn’t fill space unnecessarily, didn’t try to win her over or demand trust she wasn’t ready to give. He just… stayed. Patient. Constant. Like he was letting her set the terms.

Still, she kept her guard up.

She was too restless to sleep and too afraid of what would happen if she took her shoes off and had to leave in a hurry. Every instinct she had told her that comfort came at a cost—and she couldn’t afford to pay it just yet.

They hadn’t confiscated her knives, in her boot and jacket respectively. She figured they knew. People like them didn’t miss things like that. Maybe they hadn’t taken them away because they didn’t see her as a threat. Or maybe it was a test.

Either way, she wasn’t giving them up.

The rest of the team might not be in the building, but the archer was a trained fighter. Quiet didn’t equal soft. She would keep every advantage she could, just in case this all went south.

She looked at him, then past him—toward the doorway, where the quiet stretched wide and waiting.

Her fingers curled tighter around the edge of the bed. It wasn’t fear, not exactly. More like a tightness in her chest she couldn’t explain, an invisible weight that pressed down whenever she thought about leaving the room. Going somewhere new.

New space. New angles. New ways to get cornered.

“I’d rather stay here,” she said, voice flat but firm.

There was a beat where the quiet filled in the gap between them. He didn’t press. Didn’t question. Just nodded once—an easy gesture, like she’d said she preferred apple juice over orange—and stepped back into the hallway.

He didn’t move to close the distance between them or try to soothe the edges of her decision. Just gave her one last, understanding glance and stepped backward into the hall.

She counted five seconds before the tension dropped from her shoulders.

It was easier here. Not because it was safe—safe didn’t exist—but because she’d mapped the space in her head already. Seven steps from the bed to the door. Three to the armchair. Two to the corner where the tray table sat with the container of macaroni and the glass of water. Nothing unpredictable. Nothing changing.

Predictable was manageable.

She let her eyes scan the room again, just to be sure. The privacy curtain was half-drawn, lights low. The tower as a whole seemed to hum everywhere she went. She hadn’t let herself sit with her back to the door. Just in case.

The memory of Barton’s water glass drifted back. The way he’d set it down within reach and left it there like it didn’t matter.

She didn’t like how much that stuck with her.

Most people always wanted something—reaction, compliance, performance. Barton didn’t push. He just existed nearby, like the weather. Steady. Noninvasive. He asked questions like he wouldn’t mind either answer.

She didn’t know what to do with that.

Being watched without being overtly monitored was disorienting. Her muscles were still half-tense, ready to spring at the first sign of a trap, but nothing came. No reprimands. No locked doors. No needles.

They’d left the knives.

The thought made her jaw tighten. Knowing they were there was the only reason she could breathe through the panic sometimes. She had escaped the Jackbox with nothing but the t-shirt and jeans on her body. She found the boots by chance at the gas station, abandoned on the side of the road. She had lifted the switchblade off of a very tall construction worker who was distracted, shouting up at a crane operator. The butterknife she swiped from someone’s moving boxes that had been set out on the sidewalk. 

Every hour they didn’t take them seemed more like a test she didn’t study for.

But still, here she was.

Waiting.

Tony and the others would come. She didn’t know what they’d found, and she was dreading the answer. She didn’t know how she should respond, either. Should she be grateful they believed her enough to investigate? She wasn’t sure she could, even if she wanted to. Her brain kept trying to write new responses fast enough to meet every possibility, every expression they might wear when they came through the door.

It was exhausting.

Her eyes slid to the curtain again. She debated drawing it all the way shut, but part of her needed to see the hallway beyond. She didn’t like the feeling of being surrounded. She already knew what it felt like with the whole team standing in this room—blocking the exit, taking up all the air.

That had only been a little over an hour ago. It felt like a different life.

She adjusted her grip on the bed frame, grounding herself.

It wasn’t fear. It was survival. It was learning the shape of her world faster than it could rearrange itself. It was knowing that even when you weren’t running, you had to be ready.

So she stayed where she was and waited for them to come to her.

The first thing she noticed wasn’t the sound of boots or voices. It was the color shift—gray-blue shadows cast from the hallway onto the floor.

She looked up. She could hear their steps approaching.

Captain Rogers stepped through first.

She stilled, every muscle locked tight.

He was in uniform now.

Both he and Romanoff were, she realized as more shapes formed behind the curtain—silhouettes, dark and sharp. Romanoff moved like a whisper. She looked harder now in black tactical gear.

She hadn’t seen them like this before. And maybe that shouldn’t matter. But it did.

Something about the change made her pulse spike. It reminded her, all at once, who they were: soldiers, fighters, weapons with names.

Tony was still wearing the long-sleeved grey shirt under a black t-shirt. She felt relieved. There was a part of her that was definitely not ready to see the Iron Man suit after the way HYDRA had both feared and lusted after it.

The Captain wasn’t holding the infamous shield.

He was holding something else.

It took her a moment to process what it was.

A bear. Stuffed. Small. Worn.

Her throat tightened.

He didn’t speak right away. Didn’t cross the room. Just stood in the doorway, one hand cradling the bear against his chest like it was something fragile.

“I found this just outside the facility,” he said quietly. 

The world narrowed.

Her fingertips went cold.

She knew that bear. Not from touch or sight, but from a boy’s voice through a concrete wall. The night he arrived, crying and pleading for them to give it back.

“They took my bear,” he’d said.

James.

She never saw his face. But she knew the tremble in his voice. The way he sniffled and hung on her every word.

She’d promised him. “We’ll find you a new bear.” A better one. One that could hold new memories.

She hadn’t kept that promise.

Not only that, but she was here. Warm, relatively safe. And the only people who could’ve saved him were solemnly standing in front of her, watching. 

Words weren’t needed to confirm that James wasn’t there when they arrived. 

The Captain crossed the room slowly, stopping just far enough that she wouldn’t feel more boxed in by his intimidating stature. He crouched, not in a kneel, just low enough to place the bear on the end of the bed—close enough for her to reach, far enough not to crowd her.

“You don’t have to take it,” he said. “But it seemed like it belonged to someone.”

His voice wasn’t coaxing. It wasn’t soft for softness’s sake. It was... weighted.

She didn’t answer.

Her eyes stayed locked on the bear—its fur faded, one eye missing. It was probably green at one point. 

She could almost hear him now, muffled through concrete, asking if she thought Peter missed him too.

She reached out, her hand shaking slightly.

It felt lighter than she imagined, the kind of light that made her chest ache.

She pulled it into her lap, fingers curling tight around its middle. Her limbs seemed to move without her permission, pressing the bear forcefully against her sternum and heaving a quivering breath.

No one said a word.

She didn’t know if James ever held it again after that first night. Didn’t know if it was taken away and tossed aside, or kept like a trophy by the monsters who ran that place. But somehow, it had made it out.

She pressed her cheek lightly against its worn head. The girl had no memories of ever holding a toy like this before. She never wanted to let go.

“My lost boy,” she whispered.

They didn’t ask who she was talking about.

The Captain just gave her a slow nod, like he understood anyway.

She clutched the bear tighter.

Her breath hitched once. Then again, sharp and shallow.

The third one came with a noise—somewhere between a gasp and a whimper. She turned her face into the bear’s fur as if it could shield her, could hide the way everything inside her was starting to shake loose.

Then came the sob.

It ripped out of her, ugly and sudden, like it had been waiting all this time behind her ribs. Her body folded inward, arms around the bear, shoulders curling over it like she could protect it now, the way she hadn’t been able to protect him.

She clutched the bear tighter, desperate for anything to hold onto, but it only seemed to make it worse. The world around her felt too big, too much. She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t stop herself.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered in a hoarse voice, but it was barely audible over the sobs tearing through her. 

“I don’t—I can’t—,” the words made no sense, didn’t make anything better. She wanted to stop. She needed to stop. But everything inside her was breaking apart, unraveling with a violence she couldn’t contain. She rocked her body back and forth, unable to find any soothing rhythm. It felt like she was losing pieces of herself with every breath, and the fear of that loss was almost as suffocating as the grief itself. Please , she thought desperately, just stop. Please.

But nothing worked. The sobs came faster, louder, until it felt like they would consume her. She curled into herself, clutching the bear to her chest, her body shaking with the intensity of her breakdown. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had cried like this, couldn’t remember the last time it felt like it was completely out of her control. Her whole body trembled, a storm building inside her. A stone was lodged in her throat, and it hurt to cry around it. She couldn’t fix it, couldn’t piece herself back together the way she always had to before. And that scared her more than anything—this feeling of being broken in a way that couldn’t be fixed.

“I tried—” she choked, “—I tried to be good. I tried so hard. I said I’d get us out—”

Strong arms wrapped around her as the bed dipped down to her right. She couldn’t suppress the flinch, but the arms were familiar, if only barely. They were solid, covered in a soft grey long-sleeve. A soft pressure landed on the crown of her head. Just like before, he held her steady. 

“I’ve got you,” Tony whispered, his voice hoarse. He moved his body once, then twice, finding a slow rhythm to cradle her back and forth. It was way more effective than her distressed attempt. She let him do the work, pressing into his chest.

She finally pried one of her hands off the bear, letting it weave around his side and latch on to the fabric covering his shoulder blades. “ Please. ”

“I’m not gonna let go.” His mouth was close to her ear, and the sound of his voice was barely a whisper but hit her eardrums with force. The tremor in her body was less from fear now, more from an unfamiliar, desperate hunger for warmth, for safety. She’d never been in a position like this, not with a man. Not that she could remember, at least. Here, she relied solely on instinct —that, and her dreams. 

The man who would keep her safe, who would cradle her, hum something soft to settle her restless mind. The kind of safety she’d never known.

But that had always been a dream, a fantasy too fragile to hold. And this, this wasn’t a dream. This was a real person. Real arms. Real comfort. She hadn’t imagined it; it was happening. Even now, with her tears soaking his shirt and her body shaking like it might tear itself in half, this was real. She didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t.

Her fingers gripped the fabric of his shirt with all the force she had left. The bear was still clutched in her other hand, but it didn’t matter. She wanted to hold onto him, too. To ground herself in something solid.

The world felt like it was collapsing, but Tony, her dad , didn’t let her go.

He wasn’t wearing a tie to hold on to, but everything else was close enough.

Chapter Text

As a kid, Tony learned fairly quickly that no one should see him cry. 

It was the worst-kept secret within the Stark household that Howard Stark was ashamed to have a sensitive son. His father had been obsessed with image over reality. To him, Stark men were made of iron—unbreakable, unyielding. There was no room for tears or perceived weakness. Emotional sensitivity was a liability, and Tony was expected to be a living testament to that. Howard Stark viewed tears the same way he viewed weakness: with a stiff drink and a quiet sneer. 

Growing up in the ‘70s also had its drawbacks. He remembered a time when even the slightest display of emotion was met with scorn. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, boys were taught to keep their feelings locked away—an unwritten rule enforced with cold precision. Sensitive children, especially those who didn’t quite fit the mold, were often dismissed as “different” or even weak.

Tony recalled how, in a culture that prized toughness, any sign of emotional instability was a mark of failure. He remembered whispers in school corridors and stern looks from teachers, and how his own sensitive and disruptive nature was met with harsh, unyielding expectations. 

“Adapt or be left behind,” a school teacher once told him and his mother. The irony was bitter: while his mother offered him moments of softness, a tender reprieve from his father’s brutality, even she never really tried to stop it. Maybe she believed it would all blow over if she kept her hands clean and her smile steady.

“Stark men are made of iron,” Howard had scolded, a phrase that echoed in Tony’s mind like a commandment. 

In those early years, the only ones who encouraged him to feel, even if just a little, were Ana and Edwin Jarvis. Jarvis taught him to contain his emotions—pack them away neatly, like tools in a box—while Ana gave him the rare space to let them out, to cry in quiet corners. 

Ana Jarvis never settled for Howard’s opinion on emotional vulnerability. While she was alive, she did her best to give him a space to release all the pent-up anger, pain, or even joy. Tony knew that Jarvis warned her against encouraging the exact behaviour Howard despised. It was the only time he had ever heard them fight. Ana insisted that, so long as Howard never caught them, there was no harm in allowing Tony to express himself. Whatever agreement they arrived at ended with Jarvis in silent vigil in front of Tony’s bedroom door while Ana sat with him and held him through his tears.

When she died, Jarvis took her place at his side. The difference between the two—where Ana encouraged the boy to let it all out, Jarvis attempted to teach him how to manage it. With the gentlest intentions, Jarvis passed down a more tempered philosophy: emotions were not to be indulged, but moderated. He taught Tony how to breathe through the worst of it, how to excuse himself discreetly, and how to keep a steady voice even when his throat burned with unshed tears.

There were rules: never raise your voice in anger, never let your hands shake where others can see. Feelings could be felt but not displayed. Not loudly. Not publicly.

It wasn’t cruelty. Jarvis never shamed him. But there was a quiet undercurrent of urgency, a protective instinct shaped by the world he knew—one where boys who wept were ridiculed, and sons of powerful men were scrutinized even more. “Control is its own kind of strength,” Jarvis had once told him, resting a firm hand on Tony’s shoulder as if to anchor him.

And Tony had clung to that, not realising until much later (i.e., three weeks ago) that he’d learned to bury things rather than work through them. He’d learned that showing emotion was a risk, one that could brand him as unstable or “different” in a world that prized stoicism above all. 

It had never been more clear to him than in the past four years. 

Afghanistan, Obie, the Expo, and palladium poisoning… Stark men were made of iron, but even iron could bend if enough force was applied. 

The Chitauri had dropped from a wormhole not 350 feet above them—the memory of the massive expanse of alien battleships just… waiting. It sent a sharp wave of ice over his spine to think about what lay just outside their galaxy. 

Fury was right, as much as it butchered his pride to admit it. “We are hopelessly, hilariously outgunned.” Tony hadn’t wanted to believe it until he came face to face with an army that dwarfed all of Texas. 

And in the aftermath, while the world around him regrouped and learned how to swim in the new current they found themselves in, he was drowning. 

For Tony, trauma wasn’t a conversation to be had. It was a weight he carried alone, each anxiety attack and nightmare a private battle. Instead of speaking about it, he poured his pain into his work—into building suits. He found himself locked in a cycle of endless creation, forging layer after layer of protection, not because it made him invincible, but because it kept him from feeling the raw, unfiltered terror of his own fragility. Every suit was more than just metal and circuitry; it was a promise. A promise he would protect himself and, someday, those he cared about. 

His suits became his refuge, his way of making sense of a world in which nothing could ever be truly explained. 

Pepper had called them a distraction. It was an accurate description, considering that by building, creating, and working, he could pretend he wasn’t as much of a mess. 

Honesty was hard for him. If he had practiced honesty while growing up, Howard may have ensured he didn’t live to see college. Honesty was an invitation of trust that couldn’t be rescinded. He could tell the truth and pleasured in doing so when others would’ve preferred the lie, but the difference between telling the truth and being honest lies in sincerity. 

He had been honest with Pepper, though.

He remembered her face when he said, “Nothing’s been the same since New York.”

The words had tasted like battery acid. Useless. Too small to hold the enormity of what he’d seen: gods, aliens, dimensions that defied reason. That wormhole, that blinding light, that suffocating silence of space. No oxygen. No control. No escape.

What he didn’t tell her—what he couldn’t—was that sometimes he had looked at the suits lined up in the vault and thought: this is all that’s left of me . Metal. Wires. Systems he could monitor and control. Not a man. Not really.

Because men cracked. And he couldn’t afford to. Not when the next threat might already be on its way.

So he buried everything. The fear. The fragility. The grief. He wore bravado like armor, sarcasm like a helmet, and kept everyone at arm’s length even when they didn’t realize it. He’d learned through many occasions that everything was fleeting, so getting attached would only cause pain in the long run.

He knew nothing lasted forever, and he would have rathered them hate him than tether them to his sinking ship. 

Tony had an addictive personality, though. It’s how Rhodey had wheedled his way into a permanent spot at his side only two months into being roommates at MIT. It’s how he saw the fearlessness and competency in an assistant’s expression when she marched straight into his office and slammed a corrected accounting error on his desk. She had pepper-sprayed one of his security guards in her urgency. He promoted her on the spot.

The thing was, he couldn’t stop himself from latching on to these people. 

And when Killian came for him, when the Mandarin shattered what little control he had left, it all came rushing to the surface. The panic attacks. The disassociation. The feeling that he wasn’t real unless he was inside the suit.

Even now, two weeks removed from blowing the suits sky high in a grand finale gesture he wasn’t sure he meant, the fallout hadn’t stopped.

He had tried to stop the cycle. He wanted to be done.

But he wasn’t. Because the fear was still there. The ghosts still waited behind his eyelids. He couldn’t sleep more than three hours without waking up thinking he was back under rubble, back in space, back too late to save the people who mattered.

A shrink would have a blast marching around his head and shaking all of his issues loose. 

The point, he supposed, was that he was ridiculously in over his head.

There was a reason he never even considered having kids. Not only were you solely responsible for their survival when they couldn’t even hold their heads up or consume solid food, but you were also required to teach them how to be functional humans. How could someone like him, who barely scraped the surface of the idea of functional, ever hope to guide someone else to be an upstanding member of mankind?

He was terrified of turning her into another version of himself: a broken human forced to hide his vulnerability behind a veneer of iron resolve. The memory of his father’s harsh words and the cruel lessons of his childhood fused with the overwhelming responsibility of this new, unasked-for role.

Because what if he passed this all down? What if she became a Stark in every way that mattered—fragile underneath steel, brave enough to survive but never safe enough to rest?

He could ruin her.

It terrified him.

Tony had never been good at dealing with emotions—his own, let alone anyone else’s. And yet, here he was, holding a fifteen-year-old who had just shattered under the weight of grief.

And that was the difference, wasn’t it? He had spent his life forcing everything down, sealing off every crack, reinforcing the walls until they were iron-clad. But she—she hadn’t learned how to do that yet. She had been holding herself together with sheer, desperate willpower, and it had finally given way.

It should have been awkward. It was awkward, in the sense that he had no goddamn clue what he was doing. But he wasn’t going to be the one to pull away first. He wasn’t going to make her feel like she had to apologize for feeling too much. That was a lesson Tony Stark had learned at too young an age, and he’d be damned if she ever thought she had to earn her right to be comforted.

She had already spent too long believing she was an afterthought, a piece of collateral damage nobody came looking for.

He wasn’t going to let her believe that ever again.

The weight of that realization settled over him like a second arc reactor—heavy, permanent, something he couldn’t just take off when it got inconvenient. But wasn’t that what being a parent was?

Christ. He was really thinking of himself as a parent now, wasn’t he?

He had no plan. No roadmap. He had spent his entire adult life dodging anything remotely resembling commitment, let alone fatherhood. 

Howard Stark had seen his son as an investment, a name to be upheld, a legacy to continue. Tony had spent his entire life trying to be worthy of his approval, only to realize too late that it had never really been on the table.

This girl? She didn’t have to prove a damn thing to him.

She was already enough. She had already survived more than she ever should have had to. And whatever the hell came next, however unprepared he was for it, he wasn’t going to let her go through it alone.

Because if he had learned anything tonight, it was that letting someone see you—even at your most broken—was terrifying. And trusting them to stay was even worse.

But Tony Stark didn’t run away from a fight. And this kid—his kid, whether he was ready for that or not—deserved someone who would stay.

Tony wasn’t sure how long they sat there—just that, eventually, the tremors in her shoulders had slowed, her breath evening out in a way that told him the worst of the storm had passed.

But that didn’t mean she was fine.

He could feel it in the way she had gone still, a quiet sort of tension settling in her frame. How she wasn’t clutching him as tightly anymore, but also wasn’t quite pulling away. How her hands, one still tangled in the fabric of his shirt and the other with a strong grip on the bear, had gone from desperate to hesitant, like she wasn’t sure whether to let go or if that would be crossing some invisible line.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what came next.

She had let herself break open, and now came the slow, creeping awareness that she had done that with people in the room.

She wasn’t looking at him. Wasn’t looking at anyone, really. Her gaze was unfocused, somewhere near the floor, her face blotchy with the evidence of tears. Her lips parted just slightly, like she wanted to say something but couldn’t get her voice to work.

Tony recognized it immediately—the shame.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what was going through her head. That she had been too much. That they had all seen her like that, unraveling, raw, and that she couldn’t take it back.

Tony knew that feeling too damn well.

The idea of being responsible for someone else—someone this young, this fragile—was like being asked to defuse a bomb with a blindfold on and a countdown ticking in his ear.

But walking away? Letting her think, for even a second, that she wasn’t wanted? That wasn’t an option.

He wasn’t his father. He’d spend the rest of his life proving that if he had to.

So he held her a little tighter, careful not to make it suffocating, letting her decide when she was ready to move. She’d already been through enough without him making it worse.

Then, from somewhere just over his shoulder, Natasha’s voice cut through the stillness. “I think we should call it a night.”

The girl blinked, barely shifting, but Natasha was already pushing herself to stand, the motion casual and quiet.

“This place sucks,” Natasha continued, rolling her shoulders like the MedLab was just another battlefield she was ready to leave behind. “The lights are too bright, the beds are stiff, and I think we could all use something not sterile for a while.”

It was as much an invitation as it was a lifeline. 

Tony felt the girl shift slightly in his hold, her fingers twitching against the fabric of his shirt. She still wasn’t looking up, but there was a flicker of something—relief, maybe—in the way she swallowed hard, her blush deepening as she fully registered the fact that there were still other people in the room.

Embarrassment.

Not dramatic. Not full-body mortification. Just that quiet, creeping heat of understanding that you’d let yourself be seen in a way you hadn’t meant to.

Tony got it. He really did.

He knew that feeling. Knew the way shame could creep in right after you’d let your guard down. But if she thought for a second that anyone in this room was judging her, she was dead wrong.

So he kept his voice easy and steady and—most importantly—gave her the same out Natasha had just offered.

“Yeah, gotta say, my interior design only really shines on the residential floors,” he said, shifting slightly but making no move to force her up. “Common room’s got couches. Blankets. An actual TV instead of these heinous overhead fluorescents.”

“I thought Pepper chose everything for the penthouse?” Natasha commented, her voice retaining that soft quality.

A soft nudge of humor, just enough to make her feel like this was normal. Like no one was going to make a big deal out of what had just happened.

Like no one was going to make her feel less for it.

Still, it couldn’t erase the clear overwhelm that the girl felt. 

Natasha, ever perceptive, didn’t push. She just glanced at Steve, who nodded, and then at Clint, who was already getting to his feet. “Let’s head to the common room,” she said. “It’s warmer up there.”

Tony didn’t miss the way she phrased it—like it was just a logical move, not an effort to make things more comfortable for the girl. No pressure, no expectations. Just an easy out.

“What do you think, kid?” he murmured, shifting his hand that held her shoulder to the center of her back. “Want to get out of here?”

The girl appeared even more exhausted than before, which was understandable. She nodded without meeting their eyes but made no move to separate herself from his side. 

Tony glanced at Natasha. He wasn’t sure what he was looking to find. Some kind of signal, maybe? A nonverbal cue that it was okay to move—that it wouldn’t shatter the girl if he let go. Or maybe he just needed someone else to make the call, because right now, all of his instincts were screaming two opposite things: don’t rush her and don’t trap her here .

His experience with young girls was near non-existent, much less traumatized ones.

Natasha held his gaze. Just for a moment. Then she gave the smallest, almost imperceptible nod—not a command, not a suggestion, just... a reassurance. That she’d back him.

Or at least, that’s how he decided to interpret it.

Carefully, Tony adjusted his hold, loosening his arms but not stepping away. He gave the girl a moment to decide for herself—just long enough to leave the door open. And when she shifted, almost imperceptibly, he moved with her, rising to stand and guiding her up with him.

She followed the motion, slow and quiet, her hand releasing his shirt only when they had to. Her shoulders curled in, head low, but she stayed close, close enough that Tony instinctively kept one hand at her back—just above the shoulder blades. A steady point of contact. Nothing forceful. Just there. If she wanted space, he’d back off.

Behind them, Clint’s stool scraped and boots shifted on tile, but no one said a word. Clint moved ahead to hit the door control, while Steve waited near the hallway like he was standing guard rather than leaving. Natasha hung back, steps silent as always, but Tony didn’t have to look to know she was watching them both.

They walked like that—slow, quiet, small steps—through the threshold and into the hallway beyond. The hum of the overhead lights felt suddenly louder, and the cold metal of the walls and the medical equipment chilled the air, though it probably wasn’t the cause. The girl still held onto the bear with one hand, pressing it into her elbow. Tony resisted the urge to scoop her up. Not only would it probably freak her out, but he still had bruises all along his ribcage and chest from the fight on the Norco oil tanker. Even his short flight in the suit to the roof of the facility in Brooklyn, the “Jack-Box” as the girl had called it, put a lot of pressure on his side. 

Not that he’d admit it to anyone.

The elevator came into view, sleek and quiet and silver. Tony pressed the call button, keeping his hand steady on her back. She still hadn’t looked at anyone. Still hadn’t said a word. 

Clint didn’t speak either. He just took up his place beside them like a well-placed shadow, not drawing attention, not offering platitudes. Just there.

Steve moved back, placing his hands on his belt. “I’ll be up soon. I need to change.”

Natasha, who had been bringing up the rear, stepped beside him. “Me too.”

The elevator doors slid open, and Tony guided her inside, keeping a light touch on her shoulder as they stepped in. Clint followed with the same steady presence he’d carried all day. The doors closed behind them.

There weren’t call buttons for the top floors of the tower. JARVIS would either ask where the passenger wanted to go or be informed from context clues he had overheard. It was a safety measure so that no one who didn’t belong there could force access.

Clint rocked back on his heels. “So… this is the part where I ask why a guy with a giant tower and an AI butler couldn’t spring for elevator music.”

Tony didn’t take the bait immediately. He glanced at the girl—still silent, still tucked close under his arm—and then let out a scoff, tilting his head just enough to signal he was listening.

Clint kept going. “Could’ve at least gone with some smooth jazz. Class it up. Give it that dentist office chic.”

Tony snorted softly. “Elevator music is muzak , Barton. It was literally invented to be background noise for people trying not to notice how long they’re stuck in a metal box.”

“That’s the spirit,” Clint said. “Weaponize the awkward silence.”

“Besides,” Tony added, “if I asked JARVIS to generate playlists for every elevator ride, that’s a waste of processing power. He’s a sophisticated AI, not Pandora radio.”

“I dunno. I think it’d be kind of impressive,” Clint said. “A personalized descent into madness. Imagine Cap getting dramatic trumpet fanfare every time he goes up a floor.”

Tony couldn’t help the smirk at that. “Oh yeah. Something along the lines of the ‘Captain America Adventure Program’. All brass, no bass.”

Clint chuckled. “And Nat? I’m thinking… slow burn Russian opera. Shostakovich. With the added sound of sharpening knives.”

“She’d probably get a kick out of that,” Tony agreed, letting the rhythm of the banter carry them another few seconds upward. Nothing they were talking about made any sort of sense, but it offered a much-needed distraction. “I feel like yours would just be the sound of chewing.”

Clint narrowed his eyes. “That’s hurtful. I have range.”

“Sure,” Tony deadpanned. “Chewing and slurping.”

“Ew,” the girl mumbled. “That’s awful.”

Tony didn’t miss the way Clint froze for just half a second at the sound of her voice. It wasn’t shock—it was the quick-processing pause of someone trying not to react. To not startle the moment. Smart move.

He played it cool himself. Didn’t even look at her. Just lifted a brow in Clint’s direction and kept right on rolling. “See? Even the kid has taste.”

Clint shook his head, sighing. “I’m being bullied in my own elevator.”

“ My elevator,” Tony corrected, pointing to the ceiling like JARVIS himself would back him up.

“How long do I have to live here before it becomes partially my elevator? Is this a rent-to-own situation?”

“You’re not even paying rent, Birdbrain.”

The girl made a sound that might’ve been a laugh, soft and breathy, almost swallowed by the ding of the doors sliding open.

The common floor welcomed them with warm light and softer shadows, the starkness of the MedLab left behind with a gentle shhhk of the closing elevator doors. Here, the floors were darker, more lived-in—polished hardwoods and deep rugs, half-drawn curtains filtering the lit skyline through a muted blue haze. 

It was different as well from the penthouse. Where Pepper preferred light, neutral colours, Tony had more of an influence on this floor with the darker colours and metal accents. He figured anything would be a step up from the digs at S.H.I.E.L.D., but two of the three members of the Avengers to take him up on his invitation would probably be intimidated by the $10,000 sofa in his quarters. The common room couch was only $5,500, not that he’d tell them that.

Tony guided her in with a light hand still resting on her shoulder. He didn’t want to pull away just yet, not until she gave him the all-clear, but he was ready to let go the moment she needed space.

“Alright,” Clint said, hands in his pockets as he looked around like they’d just arrived at a sleepover. “Where’s the chocolate milk and fuzzy socks?”

“We’re not animals,” Tony said, dropping his tone into mock offense. “You think I’m running a summer camp here? We have Valrhona Cocoa. With real milk. Whole milk. None of that watered-down 1% travesty. And cashmere throw blankets.”

“Ooo, look at you. Fancier than anywhere I’ve ever stayed. Besides Cairo. Nothing beats those sheets.”

Tony ignored him. “JARVIS, set the lights to evening warm, TV to standby, and start the fireplace sequence.”

A soft series of chimes responded in affirmation, followed by a low whoosh as the built-in fireplace flickered to life. Flames danced behind glass, casting an amber glow across the couch cushions and the low coffee table.

“You ever do music as, like… actual therapy?” Clint asked, already meandering toward the couch. “Feels like something you’d technify. Like a morning meditation guided by JARVIS.”

“Do I look like someone who excels at meditation?” Tony quipped, following him towards the couch. The girl trailed at his side—still quiet, but her shoulders were a little less hunched now. Her eyes were roaming the space, taking in the glowing fireplace, the large TV mounted above it, the stacks of throw pillows, the plush blanket crumpled on the arm of the couch. Familiarizing. Grounding.

“I’ve only met Pepper once, but she seems like the kind of woman who meditates,” Clint declared, plopping one of the leather throw pillows into his lap. “Maybe we should try it. Soothing strings, waves crashing, Gregorian monk chants.”

Tony gave him a flat look. “I’m not gonna Gregorian chant this kid to sleep, Barton.”

The smile spreading on Clint’s face was all cheese. “I dunno, it could work.”

“Yeah, right after I burn sage and align her chakras.”

“She would fall asleep,” Clint argued.

“She’d fall asleep because she’d be so bored her body would shut down out of self-defense.”

“Exactly.”

Tony rolled his eyes and waved him off. “Fine. You want music so badly, I’ll queue up something decent.”

“I don’t trust your definition of decent. ”

“Please. I have impeccable taste, thank you very much.”

Clint smirked. “Do not tell me you’re gonna play your own mixtape. Do you have a mixtape? You seem like the kind of person to make your own mixtape.”

“Too late. Already playing it in my head.”

Clint kicked his feet up on the ottoman. At some point, he had removed his shoes. “So what’s the plan? Sit around and chill?”

Tony leaned his elbows on the back of the couch, looking up at the girl. He had finally taken his hand off her back, but she didn’t move away. “I was thinking movie night.”

She blinked down at him, probably not sure how to respond, but her eyes didn’t dart away like they had in the MedLab. Her face was blank as well, the only trace of the meltdown being the red rimmed blue eyes and the slightly puffy lips. Not to mention she was definitely dressed down; the old grey t-shirt, ripped jeans and jacket, and boots covered in dried mud. None of it was too dissimilar to what he wore on the daily, but who knows how long she’d been wearing the same clothes for. And especially given the fact that the girl had been on the run from HYDRA for at least two days. 

Clint nodded, supportive. “I could go for that, but we should probably establish some movie night rules if this is gonna become a regular thing. Like no horror.”

Tony raised a hand. “Agreed.”

“And always having subtitles,” Clint continued.

“Controversial, but allowed,” Tony agreed, before adding, “no musicals.”

Clint feigned a gasp. “Blasphemy. Some of us have pipes , Stark.”

Tony cracked an eye open. “Some of us have delusions , Barton.”

That earned the faintest, fleeting twitch from the girl’s mouth. It vanished as quickly as it came, but Tony saw it—and more importantly, didn’t comment.

Progress wasn’t always big, but it was always progress.

He stood up straight again, voice angled her way. “Hey. One quick thing—if you’re uncomfortable in those clothes, we’ve got options. Clint could grab something from Nat’s room, if you want. No pressure.”

The girl blinked at him. Thought about it. Then looked down at her boots, likely tracking some kind of dirt onto the Persian rug.

She didn’t answer, but her fingers tightened on the hem of her jacket.

Tony caught that. Gave a single, subtle nod. “Alright. Cool. Offer stands.”

Clint stood with a groan, stretching his arms overhead. “I’ll grab a hoodie anyway. Something loose. Might be nice to have backup.”

Tony pointed at him. “No rifling through Romanoff’s drawers.”

“Please. I’m a professional. This isn’t theft, it’s laundry redistribution.”

Tony smirked. “Catchy. Put that on a T-shirt.”

Then, without thinking—just filling air in the space left behind—he added, “Besides, we can’t let her sit around all night looking like little Orphan Annie.”

Clint froze halfway to the elevator. “Wow.”

Tony blinked. “Too far?”

Clint made a vague gesture with his hand.

Crap.

Tony’s stomach dropped. He looked down at the kid and winced. That made what—five times today? Six? He’d lost count of how many times he’d put his foot directly in his mouth with her. “That was… a reflex,” he offered, already grimacing. “I’m working on it.”

The girl’s brow furrowed. “Who’s Annie?”

Tony’s gaze flicked to her—surprised, then cautious, then softening into something lightly teasing. “Redheaded ten-year-old. Sings about the sun. Spends most of the movie in a terrible gray dress while emotionally wrecking grown adults.”

“She’s a classic,” Clint added, helpfully throwing him a rope.

The elevator chimed behind them. Natasha stepped out in joggers and a faded tank, a towel slung over one shoulder. Her hair was still damp. She surveyed the room like she was trying to assess how bad the fire already was.

“What did I miss?” she asked.

Clint grinned. “Tony accidentally calling a child an orphan.”

Natasha blinked. “That was fast, even for you.”

“We’re deliberating,” Tony said, fighting the groan rising in his chest. God, they’d all picked up on it—how fast he talked, how often he filled silences with whatever popped into his brain. “High-stakes decision. Movie night. We’re watching Annie .”

Clint snorted. “You were very anti-singing just five minutes ago.”

Tony shrugged like it was old news. “I’ve evolved.”

“Evolved,” Clint repeated, clearly not buying it. “Because of Annie ?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. “Because of the 1999 Annie, yes. Musicals are back on the table.”

Clint squinted. “You have a preference?”

Tony turned, already mid-rant. “The ’82 version’s fine—if you’re into drunk child endangerment and Cold War paranoia shoehorned into a musical about optimism. Carol Burnett is a masterclass in unhinged foster care, Punjab didn’t age well, and the whole thing just kind of screams let's use capitalism to fix sadness .”

He caught himself. His eyes flicked back to the girl—watching him now, brow still knit but more curious than confused.

Right. Keep it light.

Natasha blinked. “There are… versions?”

Tony ignored her. “The ’99 one is cleaner. Less politics, more plucky resilience. They actually let the kids smile. Alan Cumming in a pinstripe suit. The color palette doesn’t look like someone filmed it through a beige sweater.”

Clint stared at him like he was seeing a ghost. “Did you just… review both versions of Annie off the top of your head?”

Tony gave a lazy shrug, sliding his hip onto the back of the couch like he hadn’t just accessed the deep vaults of musical memory he usually kept under three layers of sarcasm and plausible deniability.

Natasha narrowed her eyes slightly, a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. “You’ve definitely seen it more than once.”

“Rhodey made me watch it,” Tony said quickly—probably too quickly. “Both versions.”

He could feel their judgment crawling over his skin in a familiar itch. It only strengthened his resolve. His face was calm and confident. Charisma was armor; he just had to keep moving.

He doubled down. “It’s a story about a kid who doesn’t give up, even when the world’s garbage.”

The words came faster than expected. His eyes flicked to the girl again. She was watching him intently now. The redness in her eyes had faded, and while she had managed to regain her composure with the attention diverted from her, there was still that hint of vulnerability there.

“It’s about found family,” he said, this time quieter. “There’s no better movie to watch.”

Clint held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, I never disagreed.”

Tony rolled forward off the back of the couch, shaking off the weight gathering behind his ribs. “Besides,” he said, “Cap’s about to walk in wearing Wranglers or something practical because God forbid anyone see him in actual modern nightwear. Might as well give him something period-accurate to connect with.”

Clint scoffed. “Period-accurate is a bit of a stretch.”

Natasha made a face—barely. A near-dead giveaway that she disagreed with something .

Tony caught it. “What?”

She shrugged one shoulder, casual, but her eyes stayed sharp. “It’s not modesty. It’s presentation.”

Tony narrowed his gaze, a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. “You saying he’s dressing up for us?”

“I’m saying he keeps the boots on,” she replied. “Even off duty. Even now.”

Tony opened his mouth, closed it again. Yeah. That was… true. Steve could look like he was ready to charge a battlefield at any given moment. Hair rumpled, sure—but boots laced. Always.

“Right, because nothing says 'battle-hardened' like refusing to wear sweatpants,” Tony muttered.

Natasha moved toward him, her voice lowering as she approached. “You’re not the only one who wears armour, Tony.”

Tony didn’t respond. For once, he didn’t have a quip ready. He just looked at the girl, then at Natasha taking a seat on the couch, then at the invisible lines still drawn between all of them.

Just then, the elevator pinged again.

Steve stepped out—t-shirt, dark jeans, boots (‘70s Chippewa, not Wranglers) still laced like he was expecting to be deployed any second. His hair was still damp, like he’d only half-dried it before stepping out of the shower. At least he wasn’t wearing a button-down.

He took one look at the four gathered near the couch and stopped mid-step.

“Did I miss something?”

“We were just voting on the most palatable version of institutional child neglect for tonight’s entertainment.”

Jesus Christ, could I think before speaking just once?

Steve blinked. “What?”

“We’re watching Annie ,” Clint clarified.

Steve stared at him, then at Tony. “... Annie ?”

“It’s a movie,” Tony rattled. “It’s got Broadway healing power. Time-accurate nostalgia. And because I said so. Also, I bet five bucks you’ve never seen it.”

“I’ve seen the comics,” Steve muttered, looking vaguely disgruntled.

Natasha smirked and tossed a throw pillow onto the couch. “It’s settled, then.”

Clint dropped into the armchair like he owned the place. Natasha was settled into her spot at the end of the couch. And the kid—

Well, the kid hovered.

She was still standing near Tony, still gripping the bear, her eyes flicking between the furniture like a trap hidden somewhere in the upholstery. Clint gestured gently, careful not to spook her, and offered again, “You sure you don’t want to change?”

“No,” she said. Not harsh. Not stubborn. Just final.

Tony didn’t press her either. He saw it too clearly now—the way her fingers tightened over the sleeve, how her shoulders straightened, protective and strong, despite the exhaustion clinging to her frame. Like the jacket itself was some kind of shield that she knew how to wield. Armor. He’d seen it before. Worn it himself in different forms. A suit, a persona, a brand.

His eyes flicked toward Steve—still standing like he was halfway between reporting for duty and waiting for someone to give him orders. Boots laced. Arms crossed. Not defensive, not aggressive. Just… alert. Ready.

Funny. The girl’s jacket, Steve’s boots, his own layers of shirts and bravado.

Yeah.

Eventually, Natasha leaned just slightly in the girl’s direction. “Come sit.”

Tony was a breath away from telling her not to give her orders, but the girl at his side stepped forward instantly. Slow steps. Careful ones. She climbed onto the couch like it and settled on the cushion next to the assassin, boots on the floor, jacket pulled tight around her. She didn’t touch Natasha, but she was there.

Tony let out a slow breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He sat down in the next space beside her, leaving plenty of room.

Steve moved next. Not to the other loveseat—closer. Near Tony, but not beside him. Enough distance to feel respectful, casual, but not detached. In Tony’s eyes, he sat down like someone who remembered what relaxation looked like and was trying to recreate it. And somehow, it worked. Maybe that was the soldier in him, too—knowing how to fake comfort in a war zone.

“Showtime, JARVIS,” he instructed, and the movie appeared on the screen.

The screen lit up. The orchestral swell hit, bright and expectant, and Tony let himself sink half an inch deeper into the cushions. He let the familiar overture wash over him.

He kept the girl in his sights out of the corner of his eye. She was watching the screen with concentration. Surprisingly, a small smirk appeared on her face once the orphans in the movie started fighting as the film truly began.

“Uh, Molly, we ain’t got mommies and daddies. And we ain’t ever gonna have ‘em. That’s why we’re called orphans.”

“I’m not an orphan! My parents are alive and they’re comin’ to get me some day.”

The scene continued, and a sliver of regret pooled in his stomach. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea to show a child who had been… whatever she had been her whole life. Could it have been kidnapping if she hadn’t ever lived anywhere else? Or was that more along the lines of human trafficking?

“Do you want to sleep with your teeth inside your mouth, or out?”

The girl stifled what sounded like a chuckle. Tony relaxed a little more.

And then—

The first notes of the song hit. Low, soft, like a lullaby.

“Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby…”

Tony felt the change before he saw it.

The girl stayed very still.

Her posture didn’t shift. Not really. But her face did. Her mouth parted—barely. Her eyes were fixed somewhere beyond the screen. And then she began to sing. Maybe sing was the wrong word for it, for how quiet it was.

Softly. So softly, he thought he might be imagining it at first.

“She’s sittin’ playing piano… he’s sittin’ payin’ a bill…”

It wasn’t quite a whisper. It wasn’t for them. It wasn’t to anyone. It was like her mind had slipped sideways, like the words were already somewhere inside her and just needed the right key to unlock.

No one moved.

“‘Betcha they’re good, why shouldn’t they be? Their one mistake was giving up me…”

Clint sat perfectly motionless in the armchair, his face unreadable, so blank it almost hurt to look at. Like he’d shoved every thought behind a wall and swallowed the key.

Natasha didn’t blink. Her head had tilted slightly toward the girl, brow furrowed, sharp and soft all at once. Watching. Listening.

And Steve… Steve’s face didn’t change much. Not in the obvious ways. But Tony saw it—the subtle shift in his jaw, the breath caught just a second too long. Whatever he’d been expecting from this movie night, this wasn’t it.

Because now he got it.

The kid wasn’t just watching the film. She was remembering.

And Steve? Steve was staring at her like he’d just seen the real enemy for the first time.

But Tony—Tony just watched her. 

Something really unsettling was happening, something that didn’t sit right under his skin. Not just the uncanny fact that she knew the words— knew them—but the way her voice carried them. Not like a melody. Like memory.

It wasn't recognition. It was ritual.

He didn’t breathe.

Because he knew. Somehow, he knew —this wasn’t just a song. This was a prayer. A desperate, childish, impossible little hope whispered into darkness. Words she must’ve clung to, sang to herself in the quiet between horrors, back when she didn’t even know his name.

She’d asked for him. Not by name, but by idea. Once, maybe a hundred times. Some kid version of him she built in her head—strong enough to fight monsters, smart enough to find her, willing enough to come.

And somewhere in his head—his ego, his delusion, his tech-saturated arrogance—he’d always assumed that if someone really needed Iron Man, he’d know . He’d feel it. Something in the air.

But there’d been no whisper. No signal. No sense of her at all.

He hadn’t even known she existed.

God, he hadn’t even been looking.

That should’ve been someone else’s burden. Some bureaucratic failure. Some intelligence oversight. But it wasn’t. It was his. She’d prayed for him and gotten no answer—and now here she was, half-broken, sitting on a couch beside strangers with a bear in her arms and that song in her mouth like it never left.

She’d believed in him.

“So, maybe now this prayer’s the last one of its kind. Won’t you please come get your baby… Maybe.”

Tony would never be able to watch this movie again.

The song faded. The silence returned only broken by the church bells in the film.

The girl blinked like waking from a trance, then shifted slightly, almost imperceptibly. A faint crease formed between her brows as she registered the weight of their attention. She didn’t shrink, exactly. But the wall went back up.

“I didn’t know it was from a movie,” she said, voice low. “Olivia used to sing that. When I was  younger.”

She didn’t elaborate, refocusing on the movie. It was fairly evident she wouldn’t be taking questions. 

Tony swallowed hard, something sharp catching in his throat.

He didn’t ask who Olivia was.

He didn’t ask how many times the girl had sung that song into the dark, wishing someone would come.

He just nodded—small, simple—and turned back to the screen.

The movie rolled on. No one said much.

They sat like that for a while, watching Annie charm half of New York with nothing but a smile and a bucket of scrub water. The girl didn’t move much, barely even blinked. She seemed locked in, like the screen held her together. When Miss Hannigan launched into “ Little Girls ,” Tony glanced sideways, just in case the words hit too close to home.

“Some day I’ll step on their freckles…”

Not exactly subtle.

He half expected the kid to flinch. Instead, she stayed completely still, eyes forward, jaw tight, not disturbed but intent—absorbing it like a sponge in water.

Tony frowned, but didn’t say anything. Maybe it was the rhythm. Maybe it was the first time she'd heard someone admit that being in charge didn't mean they had control. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to rattle her. If anything, she looked almost… transfixed.

Maybe it meant something to her. Maybe it didn’t. Either way, she hadn’t looked away. He didn’t push. If she saw something in it worth holding onto, he wasn’t going to take it away.

Then came “ Easy Street. ”

Rooster Hannigan stumbled onto the screen that pinstripe suit, fedora, smug grin, and gold tooth. Clint narrowed his eyes while his face twisted into something close to a grin.

“I’ve definitely met that guy in a bar,” he muttered.

Natasha cracked a small smile. Steve raised a brow but didn’t laugh, though Tony could swear he saw the muscle in his cheek twitch like he was trying not to.

The kid didn’t laugh, but she watched avidly. Still holding the bear, she had at some point leaned forward, and a smile had been steadily growing on her face for the better part of the movie.

Then came the part Tony wasn’t ready for.

The mansion was quiet on screen, the lights low, and Warbucks—who’d spent the first half of the movie barking orders and trying not to care—walked through his own damn palace like it was a mausoleum. He stared at the child in the red dress with reverence. A slow, simple melody filled the space.

“I’ve made me a fortune, that fortune made ten…”

Tony felt his stomach go cold. That one line hit like a punch—not because it was new, but because it was so goddamn familiar. All his life he’d been told that was the goal: build the empire, double it, then do it again. Stark legacy. Stark brilliance. Stark wealth. He’d done it in his sleep.

And for what?

“But something was missing. I never quite knew…”

His jaw ticked.

Yeah. Yeah, that one was worse.

Because what if he had known, deep down? That itch he could never scratch, the gnawing noise in the quiet—he’d buried it in tech, in tower schematics, in better suits and faster upgrades and enough sarcasm to smoke out every soft thing left in him.

And it still hadn’t gone away.

“That something was someone—but who?”

That’s when Tony looked at her again.

Not the screen. Not the warbled ‘90s clarity of Daddy Warbucks figuring out he had a heart. Just her. Leaning closer and closer to the edge of the couch, completely enchanted. Her wide eyes were full of wonder. She hadn’t so much as blinked.

There were a thousand answers to that question. And somehow, she was all of them.

He’d never wanted this. Never dreamed about it, never planned. When Pepper asked once, years ago, before Afghanistan, before the world had become so complicated, if he’d ever imagined being a dad, he’d laughed it off. Said the world didn’t need more of him walking around. He hadn’t been joking.

But now here she was. Half-wrecked, all-quiet, and watching a movie about a girl getting chosen, while sitting next to a man who had no clue how to do this—any of this—but knew that leaving her wasn’t an option.

He’d had everything. He’d built it, burned it, rebuilt it in every shape and size and color—every version of a life he thought he was supposed to live. And all this time, this, this tiny, quiet, war-torn person had been missing from the picture. And he hadn’t even known to look.

“Who would need me for me?”

His throat caught.

“Need me for me alone?”

Because she did, didn’t she?

Not for the suit. Not for the name. Not for the shield or the mission or the world-saving garbage he clung to like it gave him meaning. Just for being the one who showed up.

He stared at the screen, but the movie had gone a little blurry around the edges.

Tony rubbed a hand over his mouth and looked away from the screen for the first time in minutes. He felt trapped, with Steve on his right, his daughter and Natasha on his left, and Clint in the armchair adjacent. There wasn’t anywhere he could look to compose himself. 

If he looked at the girl right now—if she met his eyes—he wasn’t sure what would come undone.

If he still had the VHS copy of this movie somewhere, he was going to shove it straight up Rhodey’s ass.

As the final number began, Warbucks held out his pinky, and Annie’s much smaller one looped through his.

Tony barely saw the screen anymore.

“Together at last.”

His chest ached.

“Together forever.”

He didn’t glance at her—couldn’t. He felt incredibly overwhelmed and had nowhere to go.

“We’re tying a knot they never can sever.”

From the corner of his eye, Natasha exhaled, just barely. She was watching the kid, something unreadable in her expression. Steve’s arms were crossed, but his lips were curved in a small smile, and his eyes were glued to the screen.

The final words fell into place like the ring on Grace’s finger as Warbucks proposed.

“And what’s the title of the dream that’s just come true?”

Tony closed his eyes for half a second.

“I don’t need anything but you.”

The music swelled, the song ending in a flourish, and the kid blinked like she was waking up.

Tony let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

Christ.

He sat there quietly. The others had started filtering out, Steve and Clint murmuring something about SHIELD responses. It was probably important, likely relevant to the call between Steve and Fury that had occurred on the quinjet as they returned to the tower, but he didn’t have the energy to pretend to care about it. Natasha lingered near the doorway like she wasn’t sure if she should leave or not. Eventually, she did with a quiet confirmation that she would bring the girl some night clothes. 

And suddenly, it was just him and the kid.

They had both remained on the couch. The girl had also been quiet since the movie ended, seated on her couch cushion with her arms wrapped around the bear. Tony wasn’t sure if she was still processing or just exhausted, but he let the silence linger. It wasn’t uncomfortable. It was just… there. 

Well, he tried to let it linger.

He had never been good at handling silence. 

“Y’know, HYDRA probably named you Maria after my mom,” he said, keeping his voice even, like it was just an offhand thought. “Sentimental bastards. They liked their mind games.”

The girl barely reacted at first, just kept running her fingers over the bear’s fur, slow and rhythmic. Then, after a pause, she tilted her head slightly. “What was she like?”

Tony blinked. 

“My mom?” he asked.

She nodded, finally looking at him, eyes sharp with quiet curiosity.

He exhaled, rolling his shoulders back against the couch. “She was… complicated,” he admitted. “She cared. I know she did. She just—” He hesitated, thumb tapping against his knee. “She had this way of acting like if she stayed out of the worst of it, it would pass. Like if she smiled enough, if she played her part just right, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

The girl watched him closely, saying nothing.

Tony let out a short, humorless laugh. “She played the piano a lot. Classical stuff, mostly, sometimes showtunes, but she used to sing to me when I was little. Italian lullabies. I don’t remember the words anymore, just the sound of it.” He exhaled through his nose. “She was warm when she wanted to be. I think she thought that was enough.”

He hadn’t meant to say so much. The words just sort of tumbled out before he could think better of them. Maybe it was the way the girl was watching him—listening without judgment, just absorbing it.

After a moment, she looked down at the bear, pressing her thumb into its worn fabric. “Did my mom sing?”

Tony’s chest tightened. He hadn’t expected that, either.

“Yeah,” he said after a beat. “She did.”

The girl shifted, curling her fingers in the bear’s fur. “What else?”

Tony swallowed, running a hand over his jaw. “Lauran was… stubborn,” he said, a small, distant smirk flickering across his face. “She didn’t take crap from anyone. Definitely not me. She was funny, too. Had this dry, cutting sense of humor that could gut a guy in two seconds flat.”

Something in the girl’s expression softened, like she was tucking the words away carefully. “Lauran?”

His smirk dropped into a grim smile, just barely above a grimace. “Lauran MacNeal.”

Her hands played with the arm of the bear, fingers lightly pinching the paw.

Tony’s voice dropped slightly. “She just... disappeared,” he said. “I did everything in my power to find her, but her place had been cleaned out, and I couldn't find any record of her ever existing. She had—she’d been diagnosed with brain cancer when I met her, and I thought, ‘maybe she died, that’s why I can’t find her.’ For a minute, I thought I had made her up, like a figment of my imagination. That I had finally cracked. But that would've been about... six or seven months before you were born.”

Her blue eyes snapped up, meeting his. “HYDRA took her?”

“It would explain why I couldn't find her,” he said, loosely shrugging his shoulders. 

The girl didn’t answer right away. She just kept running her fingers over the bear’s fur, eyes distant. Then, almost absently, she murmured, “I don't want to be called Maria. I'm sorry.”

He nodded, leaning back against the couch cushion. “Okay. You don't have to be—”

“I know it's your mom's name, and I don't mean any disrespect—”

“Hey,” he soothed, setting a hand in the space between them. “You have agency, kid. You get to choose. We won't force you to be called something you don't want.”

Her eyes darted back and forth between his, like she was scanning him. Looking for some sign of deceit. It was uncomfortable, the way she looked straight through him.

“...Anything I want?”

Tony nodded. “Look, I don't know what your mother would've chosen for your name, and I doubt I would've named my child after my mom, regardless of whether I loved her. You…” His voice felt lodged in his throat, watching the child squinting at him with calculating eyes. They were so similar to Lauran's that he was losing his train of thought. “Be whoever you want to be, we'll back you.”

Silence lapped between them. He wondered, briefly, if he was doing the right thing—handing over so much choice to a kid who had never known what it was like to have any. Maybe it was too much. Maybe she needed something to hold onto first, a foundation before she built up from it. He almost spoke, almost tried to walk back his words, but before he could—

“Wendy.”

Tony glanced at her and hummed in question. His heart was beating fast.

She nodded, thoughtful. “Wendy-Anne Maria Stark.”

It was so quiet, so matter-of-fact, that it nearly knocked the wind out of him.

“That’s a hell of a name, kid,” he said after a second.

“I think he’d like it,” she whispered, eyes locked on the bear. “James. But it still honours your mom.”

Tony stiffened, “You don’t have to keep the name for my sake—”

“I want to,” she said firmly. “It’s reclaiming it. Like Annie reclaims her life. In the movie.”

Annie. 

Anne.

He looked at her then, really looked at her. The kid who had walked into this place guarded, silent, hands twitching at her sides. The girl who had crumbled when he held her, sobbing like she had never been allowed to before. The teenager who had been taught to be a ghost, who had learned to fade before she was ever seen. The kid who sat beside him now, bearing the weight of a decision that would shake most people—him, at least—and meeting it with certainty. With grace. With the kind of quiet resilience that had kept her alive.

Tony had fought tooth and nail for every ounce of agency he had. When you spent long enough as someone else’s puppet, it got hard to tell where their will ended and yours began. He had been a Stark before he had been anything else, molded into something sharp and gleaming and useful , with no say in what that meant. He had been a prisoner in a cave with a car battery in his chest, a weapon before he was ever a person, stripped down to nothing but survival. But through it all, he had never bent. Never broken.

And yet—he had spent his entire life sealing himself off, locking every raw nerve and fragile piece of himself behind walls that no one would ever breach. He had survived by shutting it all down.

But the girl, Wendy —she wasn’t shutting down. She wasn’t letting herself be erased. She wasn’t fading into whatever role HYDRA had carved out for her. She was standing at the edge of everything she had been forced to be, looking it in the eye, and saying no.

She was making herself real.

Tony swallowed hard, dragging a hand over his face. His throat burned. “Yeah,” he said, voice rough. “I think he’d like it, too.”

She held the bear a little closer, nodding, and for a long time, neither of them spoke. The room felt different now. Not lighter, exactly, but settled. Like something had finally shifted into place.

Tony had spent his entire life filling voids with steel and fire and noise, burying the hollow spaces so deep they might as well not exist. He had never let himself feel what might have been missing—only patched over it, reinforced the cracks, pretended it didn’t matter.

Like always, he wasn’t able to stop the whisper breaking the quiet, “ Wendy .” 

He said it with reverence, cherishing the shape of the name within his mouth, letting it flow into the space between them like a vow. The small smile breaking across the lips of the girl—of his daughter, of Wendy-Anne Maria Stark —sealed a promise within him. He wouldn’t let history repeat itself. He wouldn’t let her be forced into silence and fear the way he had been. 

There was no maybe anymore. She would never have to whisper into the dark a prayer that would go unanswered. Tony wouldn’t be able to solve all of her problems. He could barely manage his own. What he did excel at, however, was fixing things. Building something new out of ashes.

That’s what this girl had just done. In a quiet and unassuming moment, she had burst into flames and risen from the ashes left in ruin. 

For so long, maybe had been all she had. Tonight, she had something real.

Chapter Text

The room was cold—not the sharp, damp chill of the Jack-Box, but a softer cold, like a draft sneaking through a crack. The walls stood pale and smooth, no rough edges to trace, no familiar scratches. The girl sat on the bed’s edge, eight years old, her small hands twisting in a grey blanket that scratched her palms. It smelled of bleach and metal, a sterile bite undercut by a low hum that buzzed in her teeth. Her feet dangled, too short to reach the tile floor.

She hated it. Too empty, too quiet beneath the noise. She wanted to run, but the walls held her in.

The door creaked open, slow and heavy. Miss Olivia stepped inside, her shoes clicking faintly. Tall and thin, her hair pulled tight, she carried a book under her arm—always did—but didn’t touch it. Her hazel eyes found the girl, tired but soft, and a small smile curved her lips. Not big, but not fake.

“You’re not sleeping,” Olivia said, her voice gentle, free of Mrs. Lee’s sharpness or Mr. Horner’s gravelly bark. She knew why, didn’t need to ask.

The girl shrugged, pulling her knees up. The blanket scraped her shins. “Too loud,” she muttered. 

Olivia sank onto the cot’s far end, her skirt rustling as she settled. Lavender flared—sharp, sweet—slashing through the bleach’s haze, and her shadow danced, brushing the ceiling’s curve. She tilted her head, eyes glinting, and the silence stretched tight between them. “I couldn’t sleep either, my first night,” she said, words slow, deliberate. “No one came for me, though. All I had were the walls and my songs.”

The girl peered up at her, the hum fading a sliver. “No one?” she asked, her voice a wisp, barely breaking the air.

Olivia’s smile sharpened, her fingers grazing the cot’s edge. “Just my rotten luck,” she said, a laugh flickering through her words, brittle and faint. “But you—someone’s out there. You got a dad out there, maybe. He’ll find you.” Her eyes darted to the wall, beyond it, and her voice sank, fierce with a spark the girl couldn’t grasp. “This place won’t hold you forever. I feel it.”

The girl’s chest tightened, a knot shifting, loosening, then pulling taut. She didn’t know her dad—not then—just a shape, hazy and warm, flickering in her head. Olivia’s words gleamed, bright against the hum, and the girl gripped them, even as the room pulsed wider, wilder. Her right wrist clinked, chained to the cot’s metal frame, the cuff biting cold into her skin—a dull ache she barely noticed, routine as breathing.

Olivia leaned back, her shadow rippling, and a hum rose from her throat—low, steady, swelling. “ Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby… ” The song unfurled, threading through the air, its notes soft but fierce, drowning the bleach, taming the hum. The girl’s shoulders eased, the cot’s sting fading, her breath hitching to match the tune. “ She’s sittin’ playin’ piano… ” Olivia’s voice cradled her, a lifeline tossed across the dark, and her hands—pale, steady—rested in her lap atop her book. A Historical Anthology of Music .

The girl tilted her head, the lyrics sinking in—strange, new, yet heavy with something she couldn’t name. “ Maybe they’re strict, as straight as a line… ” Olivia sang, and the words burrowed deep, curling around the hazy shape in her mind. “ Don’t really care, as long as they’re mine… ”

A dad, far off or close, waiting—she didn’t know him, didn’t know if he was real, but the song painted him clear: strong, searching, hers. It was the first time she’d heard it, this quiet weave of hope, but it lodged in her chest, a seed she’d carry. Years would stretch it—through nights of cuffs and concrete, through whispers in the dark—a mantra, a prayer she’d hum to herself when the walls closed tighter. “ Won’t you please come get your baby… ” Olivia’s voice trembled, just once, and the girl clung to it, the promise of maybe blooming wild in her small, caged heart.

The walls shuddered, swelling inward, and the hum surged, a roar swallowing the lavender’s edge. Olivia’s shadow flared, vast and trembling, and her face softened, hazel eyes drifting to a nowhere beyond the girl’s reach. The final note—“ Maybe… ”—hung fragile, quivering, then snapped as the shadow crashed down, drowning the room in black.

Wendy jolted awake, breath snagging in her throat, the bear crushed against her ribs. The hum didn’t fade—it sharpened, shifted, burrowing into her skull with a new, jagged edge. Darkness softened, bleeding into a dim blue glow that traced the ceiling’s lines. The cot’s sting was gone, replaced by a plush bed, sheets sliding slick under her palms. Her right arm stretched above her head, wrist tingling—a phantom tug pulled it taut, but no cuff bit her skin, just the echo of one.

She didn’t move. Just breathed—shallow, quick. Her eyes scanned the room, sharp and wide.

Not the Academy. Not the Jack-Box.

No flickering pipes. No chemical stench.

The hum pulsed again, somewhere deep in the walls—too clean, too steady, like everything here. A window leaked the faintest light, throwing long shadows against smooth, unfamiliar walls. The air pressed in warm and thick. Too warm. The bear’s matted fur rasped beneath her fingers—real. Still there.

But her clothes were wrong.Her jacket and t-shirt were gone, replaced by a soft red jumper that clung to her wrists, the ribbed cuffs too gentle. Her jeans were missing, swapped for loose black joggers she didn’t remember putting on. Her boots—

Her boots were by the door. She found them on her second sweep, mud dried along the soles, faintly catching the blue light.

One of the doors—there were two. She counted: twelve steps to the door to the left of the bed, seven to the door across the room, ten to the window, one to a nightstand where a lamp loomed, its silver base glinting.

Her gaze swept the room again, chasing anchors—the boots’ mud flecks, the lamp’s gleam, the soft haze from the large floor-to-ceiling window. Flashes of memory sparked in her mind’s eye: Tony’s voice, low and rough, “I’m not gonna let go.” A TV screen glowing, children singing. Natasha’s shadow crossing the couch, silent. The bear’s weight in her lap, heavier then. Last night—blurry, jagged—slipped into focus, then out, like a radio signal cutting through static.

The movie lingered— Annie , its songs threading through her head. Olivia must’ve seen it, must’ve known those words before she’d sung them in that cold room. All this time, Wendy had thought it was something the woman spun from nothing, a quiet improvisation to still her mind. The girl on the screen, red hair wild, voice loud, had fought her way out. She scrubbed floors and smiled through it. 

Wendy’s chest ached, hollow and tight. Annie had no one at first, like her, caged, watched, waiting for someone to come. But Annie was brave, loud where Wendy stayed quiet, strong where she bent. She’d wanted that, hadn’t she? To stand up, to fight back, even when the cuffs bit, even when the noise drowned everything else. There were times she did, and she still held the scars. They never took her smart mouth, though—just her will to wield it. 

Maybe she could’ve been like Annie if the walls hadn’t gripped so fiercely.

The haze thinned. Last night became clearer in her mind. After the movie, the room had gone quiet. Barton’s laugh fading down the hall. The Captain’s boots retreating, steady and sure. She’d sat there on the couch, the bear in her lap, the music still playing in her mind. Tony had sat beside her. Not saying anything. Just there, elbows on his knees, staring at the blank screen like he was still seeing something.

“Hell of a name, kid,” he’d said, voice hoarse, when she’d whispered it— Wendy-Anne Maria Stark . For James, for his mom, for something she could hold. He’d rubbed his jaw, nodded once, like it was already done. The elevator had pinged then—Natasha stepping out, hair braided, a stack of clothes in her arms. She’d moved silently, precisely, setting them on the couch arm—red jumper, black joggers, white socks, underwear—folded too neat, too crisp.

Tony had glanced up, smirking faintly. “Took you long enough—thought you’d gone AWOL.” 

Natasha had arched a brow, settling back in her spot on the couch next to Wendy. 

“Had to dig through my closet,” she’d said, voice dry. “Not exactly a department store.” 

Tony had snorted, leaning back, then tilted his head toward her. “Wendy-Anne’s been holding court—movie night’s a hit, we’ll have to make it a tradition.” The name rolled out easy, no pause, no fanfare—just there, like it’d always been. She’d blinked, the sound of it sinking in, a thread tying her to the room.

Natasha hadn’t flinched—her eyes flicked to Wendy, sharp but calm, taking it in. “It’d be good for morale,” she’d said, simple, like she’d filed it away and moved on. No questions, no stumble—a professional, smooth as the walls here. Her gaze lingered a second, then slid back to Tony, letting the moment settle without weight.

She’d nudged the clothes closer with her knuckles, the red jumper catching the fireplace glow. “If you want them,” she’d said, voice low, flat—no push, no edge. Just an option, left hanging. Tony had watched, quiet for once, arms still crossed. Wendy’s fingers had tightened on the bear, the jumper’s softness brushing her arm, but she hadn’t moved—boots still on, jacket still hers.

Tony had stretched, popping his shoulder. “You should crash, kid. Beds up here are next-level—JARVIS does the whole ambient thing, total game-changer.” His voice lilted, pitching perks, no edge to it. 

Wendy’s throat had locked. She’d been holding it together since bolting from the Jack-Box—navigating the chaos, the lack of a clock to chase—but today’s weight had ground her down. 

“There’s a room down the hall,” Natasha had said, voice steady as she rose, brushing imaginary dust from her pants. “No one lives on this floor. Just guest rooms.” She’d stepped closer, her eyes catching Wendy’s clenched hands, the bear dented under her grip. “Come on.”

Wendy had eased off the couch, boots scuffing the floor as she clutched the bear closer—a solid weight against the churn of nerves building in her stomach. She didn’t have a lot of energy left to mask it. 

She had been grateful they were putting her up on this floor, alone. Alone meant no stares, no pressure. There was safety in being alone. In every facility she had lived in, her best memories were when she was left alone. 

She had always known when she would be alone, though, and for how long. At the Academy, they followed a very strict regime—6:00 AM wake-up, 7:00 AM combat drills, 1:00 PM lunch break, 9:00 PM lockdown. Even at the Jack-Box, she was able to piece together a schedule, solitude stretching longer there. She’d known when, how long, every time. 

Tony had ambled ahead, hands in his pockets, leading them toward the hall. “JARVIS can set the mood—lights, temp, whole deal,” he tossed back, voice carrying that salesman’s cadence. Natasha stayed beside her, steps measured, a rhythm that hooked Wendy’s focus despite the twist in her gut. 

The guest room had opened before them, air warm and thick, walls smooth under the hall’s stark light. Tony had paused at the threshold, gesturing inside. “He’ll keep it cozy—five-star stuff,” he’d said, softer now, his eyes flicking to her. He’d leaned on the doorframe. “Ask nice, and the lights’ll glow whatever color you want.”

Wendy’s jaw had tightened; mood lighting didn’t tell her what to do . 

Her pulse had kicked harder. She shouldn’t have been this frustrated with freedom. This is what she had craved for so long. Freedom was supposed to be the prize, the thing she’d clawed for, but it sprawled too wide now, a blank map with no lines. She should’ve been better at this, shouldn’t she?

 Natasha had glanced over then, catching the stiff line of her frame, and spoke low. “Lights out when you’re ready. The window doesn’t open on this floor. Door’s yours to close. That’s a bathroom. Shower before getting into bed—you’ve been outside in the same clothes for two days.”

Tony’s smile had dropped, brow furrowing. “She’s not in boot camp, Nat—what’s with the orders?” His tone sharpened, a quick flash of edge. Natasha didn’t blink, just held his stare, calm as stone. Wendy’s breath steadied—those words clicked into place, small and clear, a frame to grip. Her boots landed firmer as she entered the guest room.

Natasha crossed to the large window, tugged the latch firm with a quick snap, then turned back. “You’re good here,” she said, brushing past Tony toward the hall. 

Tony had lingered, arms dropping as he watched her—Wendy’s shoulders loosened, her grip on the bear easing a fraction. He exhaled, tension bleeding out, and rubbed the back of his neck. 

“Tell JARVIS what time you want to wake up—he’ll set it,” he said, voice quieter, a tentative nudge. A half-smile tugged his lips. “Sleep tight, Wendy-Anne.” He stepped back and left the door open a sliver.

She had waited until the sound of their footsteps was far enough away before closing the door herself.

Wendy pulled her right arm down from above her head, letting the shoulder muscle relax from its stiff position it held throughout her sleep. Her hand let go of the bear to rub at the tender muscle where her shoulder met her neck. Her eyes searched the room again, spotting no clock or any way to tell what time it was. 

She wondered…

“JARVIS?”

Her voice sounded scratchy in her ears. 

“How may I assist you, Miss Stark?” the AI responded, inflection calm and surprisingly human.

The moniker stunned her. She guessed it was correct, however strange it felt hearing someone—some thing —refer to her as that. With respect, rather than derision. 

“What time is it?” she asked, staring at the ceiling. 

“The time is currently 3:52 AM on the 4th of January, 2013,” JARVIS said. “You have been asleep for two hours and nineteen minutes. Mr. Stark is in the Penthouse awaiting Miss Potts’s arrival. Would you like me to alert him?”

“No,” she said quickly, voice still rough. She sat up, bear sliding into her lap. The room hummed around her, a low buzz that didn’t prick her senses as much after some sleep. The red jumper hung loosely on her frame, black joggers snug around her waist but roomy on her legs. On the nightstand, her old jacket and jeans stayed folded. She had placed the butter knife on top of the clothes. A quick swipe of her hand under her pillow found the switchblade right where she left it.

She stared at the blade in her hands, spinning it between her fingers. She hadn’t had any need for them—not yet. That could always change.

However, even though her body still ached with exhaustion, her mind was clearer now. The shower she took before bed had helped. 

She’d gone into the attached bathroom after Natasha’s nudge—shower before getting into bed. The bathroom had illuminated once she opened the door, her blue eyes squinting at the sudden brightness. The bathroom was easily as large as her room at the Jack-Box. A wall-to-wall mirror filled the space above the marble counter, which held two sinks and a small gathering of bottles, likely soap. Directly next to the entrance was a linen closet, stacked full of soft, plush navy blue towels. The shower was to the right. Its glass doors were frosted, hiding the sleek modern tile lining the shower wall. 

She’d turned the water on, and it had hit loud—a sharp spray that stung the air. Her first real wash in months—not the quick rags at the Jack-Box, not the cold drips at the Academy. She’d stood with her back to it, letting the heat soak her shoulders. Too loud, too wet—she’d kept her head turned away, face dry, counting tiles to block it out. The provided soap smelled amazing, though. The scent was coconut and vanilla. Wendy hoped she’d be able to use it again. 

She felt clean now—lighter. The jumper and joggers fit easily, softer than anything she’d worn, but they left her bare—no steel, no edge. She swung her legs off the bed, socked feet brushing the floor, and stepped to the nightstand. Her fingers grazed the jacket’s rough hem. The knife glinted atop the fabric. She could take them, pull the jacket back on, lace the boots—walk out armed. Ready.

But they had watched a movie the night before. They had sat in a living room, a family room , and relaxed. They had given her clothes. They had given her a place to sleep. They provided her with safety.

Not only that, they had believed her. Yes, it had taken some convincing, but they’d listened .

Wendy put the switchblade back under the pillow on her way out of the room, grabbing the bear instead. Her hand paused on the handle of the door.

“Am I allowed to leave?” she asked, holding her breath.

“Of course, Miss Stark,” JARVIS said. “You have unrestricted access to all common and penthouse areas.”

The last time she’d opened a door without knowing who waited on the other side, it had changed everything.

Wendy didn’t linger on that for long, surging forward through the door and into the hallway. She traced her steps back to the living area—twelve steps down the hall, seven more to the open floor.

The common room welcomed her with soft shadows and a faint glow, the fireplace embers still smoldering behind glass. The polished hardwoods gleamed dark under her socked feet, cool through the fabric, and a deep rug brushed her toes as she crossed to the couch. The leather looked rich. It sat softer than it looked, cushions dented from where they’d all piled on. She sank into it, bear in her lap, and ran her fingers over the cashmere blanket draped across the back—silky, warm, fancier than anything she’d touched at the Academy.

The half-drawn curtains filtered the skyline outside, a muted blue haze cutting the city’s glare. Metal accents glinted along the coffee table’s edge. The TV hung dark above the fireplace, stacks of throw pillows slumped beside it—Barton had tossed one around, grinning. The space felt different now, quieter without Tony’s quips or Barton’s laugh. Lived-in, Tony had called it. Not sterile like the labs she’d known, not cold like the Academy dorms. She leaned back, letting the leather cradle her, the hum of the tower softer here.

It was then that she realized how tall the ceilings were. They reached nearly fifteen feet into the air above her. 

Her eyes roamed—the rug’s weave, the curtains’ heavy drape, the low table sitting between the couch and the fireplace. Last night, the flames had danced bright, warming her hands. The blanket had been crumpled then, Barton kicking his feet up. It had felt safe—strange, but safe. She pulled the cashmere closer, wrapping it around her shoulders. Two hours of sleep hadn’t erased the ache in her bones, but this room dulled it some.

“Miss Stark,” JARVIS said, voice slicing through the stillness. “Miss Potts’s arrival is imminent. Mr. Stark is in the Penthouse—you might find it best to join him now.”

Wendy straightened, bear tight in her grip. “Why?” she asked, brow creasing. “What’s it matter if I’m there?”

“Miss Potts has been away,” JARVIS replied, calm and steady. “Your presence could put Mr. Stark at ease.”

She blinked, confusion tugging at her. Tony hadn’t said anything about needing her—had he? There hadn’t been any mention of anyone arriving last night either. She shifted, the blanket slipping off her shoulders. “He’s fine up there, isn’t he?”

“He is in the Penthouse, as noted,” JARVIS said, voice even. “But Miss Potts’s return is significant. It would be beneficial for you to join him.”

Her throat tightened. Beneficial how? She didn’t know this Potts woman—only the name, sharp and short, from JARVIS earlier. Tony hadn’t asked for her, not out loud. 

Still, the AI’s words hung there, nudging her. She may not know who the woman was, but the AI seemed convinced she needed to be there. Was it possible that the woman posed a potential risk? If so, why wouldn’t the AI ask for Romanoff? Or the Captain?

It didn’t matter. She could handle a threat. Wendy wouldn’t risk her chance at normalcy on nerves.

She stood, folding the blanket back over the couch, and glanced at the room one last time—the dark floors, the glowing embers. Then she turned—twenty-two steps to the elevator. 

Wendy hesitated about pressing the ‘up’ button. A quick sprint back to the guest room had her setting the bear down on her clothes and grabbing the switchblade—just in case. Her heart raced, contrasting her slow breathing. This was something she had been trained for. 

She pressed the button with quiet resolve.

That resolve evaporated when the elevator doors opened—and revealed two people.

She recognized one. Mr. Hogan, the security guard from the lobby—black suit and blue tie—the one who’d walked her to the interrogation room.

The other, she did not. The woman was tall, thin, and wearing a sharp white suit. A suitcase rested at her side. Ginger hair fell loose against one shoulder. She looked expensive. Tired, but expensive.

Mr. Hogan’s eyes widened, just a flicker, before settling. “You’re the kid from downstairs,” he said, voice low, steady. He stepped in, glancing at her hand—the switchblade glinted faintly under the elevator light. “Didn’t expect you up this late.”

The woman—Potts, probably—tilted her head, gaze sharp but tired. “So you’re her,” she said, words crisp, like she’d been waiting to match a face to a story. Her eyes flicked to the blade, then back to Wendy’s face. “Tony said you’d be here—just not right here .” 

Wendy froze, switchblade heavy in her grip, staring back. Her chest tightened, breath shallow. The elevator hummed loudly, doors still open on 87.

Mr. Hogan shifted, uncrossing his arms. “You getting in?”

Wendy swallowed, the blade cold against her palm. They knew her—knew of her—and she didn’t know them. Not really. Her feet moved, stepping inside, socked soles cold on the metal floor. The doors slid shut behind her, the hum kicking up again.

The ride was short, quiet. Mr. Hogan stayed by the panel, watching her from the corner of his eye. The woman stood near the back, suitcase still, her gaze steady but softer now, like she was piecing something together. Wendy kept the switchblade low, fingers tight, counting—one floor up to 88. The rumble settled in her ribs.

The doors opened to the Penthouse. Tony stood by the windows, pacing, a mug in one hand. He turned, eyes widening. “Kid? What’re you doing up?”

The woman stepped out. Her suitcase rolled to a stop. “Tony?” she said, her voice clearer now, slicing through the quiet.

Mr. Hogan followed, brow creasing again. “Pepper and I found her on 87—thought you’d have a heads-up.”

Pepper. That was the name Barton mentioned the night before. “I’ve only met Pepper once, but she seems like the kind of woman who meditates.”

“JARVIS, did you wake her up for this?” Tony asked, tossing a look at the ceiling, tone sharp.

“I did not wake her, sir,” JARVIS said, unbothered. “I believed it important that your family be present.”

Tony froze, mug halfway to his mouth. Wendy’s chest tightened— family . The word hit clean and fast, like something she didn’t know she’d needed to hear until it was said aloud. The woman—Pepper—raised a brow, looking between them. Happy just stood there, arms crossed again, waiting.

Pepper set her suitcase upright, exhaling slowly through her nose. “Family,” she said, voice low, testing the word. 

Tony set the mug down on a glass table, the clink soft but loud in the quiet. “Yeah, well, surprise,” he said, hands spreading quick, a half-smirk flickering. “Still processing everything. You’re pretty much caught up, Pep.”

Pepper’s lips pressed thin, but her eyes softened, flicking to Wendy briefly. “Caught up from a phone call, sure. You said she’s yours, that HYDRA was involved. Didn’t say I’d walk into—” She gestured vaguely at the room, her suitcase, the hour. “This.”

“Welcome to my day,” Tony muttered, rubbing his neck, pacing short. “Didn’t plan a midnight meet-and-greet.”

Mr. Hogan shifted, uncrossing his arms. “Pepper filled me in on the drive from the airport,” he said, voice flat, steady, the kind that didn’t bend. “Were you gonna tell me?” 

Tony glanced at him, seemingly unbothered by the thinly veiled accusational tone. “‘Course I was. Maybe not at 4 AM, though, but this day has been all about rolling with it, so.”

Pepper stepped closer, her white suit catching the dim light. “Rolling with it,” she echoed, faint and tired. “Have you called Rhodey?”

Tony’s pacing stopped, his hand dropping to his side, fingers curling loose. The air shifted, cooler now, pressing against Wendy’s skin as she stood there, the switchblade a steady weight in her grip. 

 “Rhodey’s got his hands full right now. Didn’t want to drop this on him, not before I had everything sorted.”

“I flew back from Sacramento because you asked me to stand with you. I’m standing. But Rhodey’s still out there, clueless? He’s your best friend, Tony.”

“He’ll get the memo,” Tony said with a shrug and a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “Once I figure out how to say, ‘Hey, buddy, got a teenage HYDRA escapee who’s apparently my kid’ without him thinking I’m off my rocker.”

Pepper’s mouth twitched—almost a smile, but it didn’t stick. “You’re halfway there already.” She glanced at Wendy, her gaze calm now, measured. “Sorry, I’m being horribly rude. I’m Pepper.”

She held out a hand, fingers steady even if her posture wasn’t.

Wendy blinked. Then, slowly, she folded the blade closed. The click was quiet. She tucked it into her left hand and reached out with her right.

The handshake was brief—but warm. Solid. Real.

“Wendy-Anne,” she said.

The name rolled out smooth, her own voice steady for once, and a thrill shot up her spine—sharp and electric.

She clears her throat, her voice steady and calm. "Maybe we should all sit down," she suggests. "It’s been a long day for everyone."

Mr. Hogan stepped back toward the elevator. “I’ll call an emergency briefing in the morning to make sure this stays locked down. She caused a hell of a scene in the lobby yesterday.”

Wendy looked at the man with a blank expression, her chin steady. She would not apologise for what she had done to get to where she was now. 

“You’re the boss, Happy,” Tony said, saluting.

Mr. Hogan—Happy—pointed at Pepper. “ She’s the boss.” He left without another word. The elevator doors slid shut behind Happy with a soft hiss.

Pepper watched it for a beat, then turned back toward the room. Her eyes lingered on Wendy—longer this time. Not studying. Not interrogating. Just... seeing.

Wendy stood still, the switchblade still closed in her left hand, but no longer clenched like a weapon. Her shoulders eased just a fraction as she scanned the space. The penthouse was quiet. Spacious. A little too open for comfort, but warmer than she expected—soft lights, low furniture, a blanket draped over the back of a nearby chair like it had actually been used.

Tony shifted, gesturing awkwardly. “C’mon. Let’s sit before we all pass out.”

Pepper arched an eyebrow at him but said nothing. She simply left her suitcase behind and sat on the large cream sofa, smoothing the line of her jacket. Tony dropped into the corner of the sectional, rubbing at his temple like the day was physically still weighing on him.

Wendy remained standing for a moment longer, taking stock—two adults, one couch, two armchairs, three potential escape routes if she needed them. Only one exit. Then she stepped forward, sinking slowly into the far end of the couch. Not too close. Not too far. Close enough to be counted.

Her fingers toyed with the folded knife in her lap.

Pepper leaned forward, elbows resting lightly on her knees. “Wendy-Anne,” she said again, testing the name with a quiet sort of reverence. “That’s beautiful.”

“It’s new,” Wendy replied. She didn’t elaborate.

Pepper nodded like that was more than enough.

"So, Wendy-Anne," she began, her voice gentle, "tell us about yourself. What do you like to do?"

The question landed like a stone in still water, rippling through Wendy’s thoughts. She froze, her fingers tightening around the switchblade in her lap. No one had ever asked her that—not in HYDRA, not in the cold, gray rooms where survival was the only goal. Her breath hitched as she searched for an answer, the silence stretching longer than she meant it to.

"I… I don’t know," she said at last, her voice small. She glanced down, tracing the edge of the switchblade casing with her thumb. "I mean, I haven’t had much time to figure it out. They didn’t let us… do things. Not like that."

Pepper tilted her head, her expression softening further. "That’s okay. You don’t have to know everything right now. How about something small? Anything you enjoyed, even a little?"

Wendy remembered the library of the Academy. Short shelving units curated with books that would enhance, support, or confirm their teachings. Snow White, Lolita, Fahrenheit 451. They weren’t for pleasure—they were for training, for shaping her into something sharp and obedient.

Her lips parted like she might speak, but no sound came. Her thumb traced slower now—back and forth, back and forth—along the metal seam of the knife. Something about the question lodged under her ribs, not painful exactly, but unfamiliar. Unpracticed.

Wendy’s eyes flicked toward the floor, then to the far wall. “I liked music,” she said eventually. The words came out too even, too controlled—like a line from a play she barely remembered rehearsing. “I read books. But their books were… selectively specific.”

Tony grimaced, leaning back into the couch with a sigh. “Let me guess. Nothing with happy endings?”

She shook her head once. “Nothing with choices.”

Pepper’s brow furrowed, her gaze resting gently on Wendy. “You said you liked music—do you mean playing it? Or listening?”

“Listening,” she said quietly. Then, after a beat: “They had me in lessons for years. I learned a couple of different instruments. Olivia taught me to sing. For practice. Breath control.”

Tony’s eyebrows rose. “Practice? Like choir practice or supervillain bootcamp karaoke?”

She smirked. “Not sure what either looks like.” Her brevity faded, though, remembering Olivia’s lessons. “They were pretty insistent about the music lessons, though. I never knew why, but I enjoyed them enough. They stopped when Miss Olivia stopped showing up.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward—just full. Weighted. Like everyone in the room was aware they were somewhere in the middle of a sentence that hadn’t been finished yet.

Wendy leaned back, drawing her knees up slightly onto the couch. Her fingers tightened once around the knife before relaxing again, like she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. Her voice was steady when she spoke next.

“What happens next?”

It wasn’t a challenge. Just a question. Neutral. Practical. She looked at Tony when she asked it, but her eyes flicked to Pepper too—testing, maybe, to see if either of them had an answer worth trusting.

Tony exhaled through his nose. “Honestly? I have no idea.”

“That’s new,” Pepper said dryly.

“I said I didn’t have a plan. Doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts,” Tony shot back.

Wendy tilted her head. “Thoughts like… what?”

Tony’s expression shifted, and Pepper watched him closely, as if waiting to see whether he’d actually say it or try to charm his way around the question. He didn’t. He leaned forward instead, forearms resting on his knees, staring into the middle distance like he was still putting the pieces together.

“Tomorrow, we start making sense of what they did. Who let them do it. How far it goes.”

“HYDRA,” Wendy said. Not a question.

Tony nodded. “They were inside S.H.I.E.L.D. Still are. We’ve got to find out where. Who we can trust. Start rooting them out.”

Wendy’s mouth tugged into the smallest of frowns. “Will they listen to you?”

Tony looked at her. “No,” he admitted. “But I think they’ll listen to us.”

Pepper leaned back, folding her arms as her eyes drifted toward the window. “Fury’s not going to like it. You taking over his house.”

Tony scoffed. “It stopped being just his house the minute he let snakes in the walls.”

A pause. Then Wendy asked, “And me?”

Tony turned toward her, serious now. “You’re not a weapon. You’re not their experiment. You’re my kid. And you’ve more than done your part.” His lips twitched, forming around words that seemed stuck in his mouth. “However, you’re also a resource. Anything you can tell us will be helpful.”

“I’ll do anything,” she rushed, leaning forward. 

His eyes softened. “I know. But above all, and I think everyone will agree with me, your job is to just… learn to be you. A kid.”

Wendy’s jaw tightened, and she blinked once. Her voice was quieter now. “I’ve got a target on my back.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “But you’re not alone anymore.”

Pepper’s voice was softer than Tony’s but no less firm. “You don’t have to figure it all out right now. You just have to stay.”

Wendy nodded—barely. But it was something.

The silence this time felt different. Settled. Not solved, but steadier somehow.

JARVIS broke it gently. “Miss Potts, sunrise is in an hour and forty minutes. Shall I prepare your schedule for the day?”

Pepper rubbed her temples. “Please don’t.”

Tony stretched, groaning faintly. “Alright, bedtime. For real this time.”

Wendy didn’t move. Her knees were still drawn close to her chest, arms wrapped loosely around them, the switchblade balanced in her hand. Her body wasn’t tired, not exactly—but everything felt heavy. Her thoughts. Her skin. Like her energy had burned out an hour ago. It wasn’t a new feeling, but the exhaustion weighed heavier. 

Tony shifted, then glanced over. His tone was lighter now, but not flippant. Just soft around the edges.

“Hey. You wanna head back to the common floor? Catch a little more sleep before the rest of the circus wakes up?”

She blinked, slowly. The idea of sleep felt distant and strange, like it belonged to another version of her—one that hadn’t been awake long enough to forget what rest felt like. But the room downstairs had been quiet. Clean. No locks on the outside. And he was asking. Not telling.

“If that’s okay,” she said. Her voice didn’t waver, but it came out smaller than she meant.

“Of course it is,” he said. “You’re not on a schedule anymore, kid. No alarms, no drills. You sleep when you need to.”

Wendy stood carefully, knees stiff. The blade was still in her left hand, folded shut. No one mentioned it. Tony just nodded once toward the elevator, already turning to walk.

Pepper murmured something about getting ready upstairs and disappeared up the grand curved staircase with her suitcase. Wendy watched her go. 

She followed Tony down the elevator and through the hall without speaking, her bare feet nearly silent on the polished floor. The lights were dim, enough to see but not enough to sting her eyes. She kept count of the turns and the exits, but not because she felt unsafe—just because it was habit.

He didn’t ask her any more questions. Didn’t fill the air with noise. 

When they reached the door, she hesitated just a moment before stepping inside. The room was exactly how she left it. She didn’t know if that made it better or worse.

Tony lingered by the door. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said quietly. “If you need anything, just ask.”

Wendy nodded, a slow dip of her chin.

“Goodnight, kid.”

He left the door open a crack as he walked away, same as before. Not locked. It was still her decision whether to shut the door.

She stood there for a moment, staring at the space around her. Then she walked to the bed, setting the folded knife gently on the nightstand. Her fingers hovered over it for a second longer, then retreated. She crawled beneath the covers—not stiffly, not curled tight like before, but not sprawled either. Somewhere in between. Her right arm still found its way above her head.

A thought startled her, unbidden. She felt safe enough to be tired.

She left the door open.

Sleep didn’t come right away. But she let herself close her eyes.

Chapter Text

Wendy didn’t wake all at once.

The world came back slowly, in pieces. The weight of the blanket curled over her shoulder. The cotton-soft quiet of a room without generators. The low hum of something mechanical—gentler than the ones she was used to, like a building sighing through its vents.

And something else.

A clink. Then another. Glass on marble.

She kept her eyes closed a moment longer, letting the sound paint its own picture: a fridge opening, something being set down, and the low, deliberate thump of a cabinet door.

The air smelled like fruit and something cold—minty, maybe. It didn’t make sense at first. Not until the faint whir of a blender kicked in, muffled through the wall. Something dropped. A soft thunk.

The kitchen.

Wendy blinked her eyes open, slow.

The room was dim, lit by the hazy blue of early morning, but not as dark as it was the last time she woke up. Her boots were still near the door, their dried mud flaking onto the tile. The bear sat tucked under her arm, warm from sleep. The clothes she wore were still too soft, too clean to feel like hers. But they hadn’t changed overnight, and that helped ground her.

So did the quiet.

She sat up, the blanket slipping down her front, and eased herself to standing.

She didn’t mean to go looking for Romanoff.

She was just following the noise.

Romanoff stood at the counter in a pair of charcoal sweatpants and a fitted tank, short hair braided and eyes clear like she’d been awake for hours. The tank top and sweats made her look less like someone dangerous and more like someone practical. Efficient. At ease. An empty tall glass sat on the counter in front of her, right next to a blender full of… something—pale green, suspiciously healthy-looking. She dropped another ice cube into the blender and hit the button.

It was not the most violent thing Wendy had seen that week, but it was close.

Romanoff glanced over her shoulder just long enough to make it clear she’d noticed her.

“Morning,” she said mildly. “You’re up early.”

Wendy didn’t respond, shifting her weight awkwardly. Her brain still felt padded, like it hadn’t caught up to the rest of her. The clock on the stove blinked 06:36 in blue digits. She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept, only that it had been deep enough to make waking feel like surfacing from a long way down.

The kitchen came into clearer focus as she stood there. She hadn’t really seen it the night before—too many new things competing for attention. Now, with just the two of them and no chatter from the others, she took it in. It opened into the living area, wide and clean, but had its own edges—marble counters, matte black fixtures, warm wood cabinets that softened the stark lines. A bowl of oranges sat on the island, and she wondered if they were for decoration or for actual consumption. She had seen houses that kept food out for display only. It never made sense to her.

“You want something? Or just judging my life choices?”

Wendy blinked.

Romanoff turned back to the blender. “You can judge. I’m not proud of the kale.”

That earned the faintest flicker of amusement from Wendy’s mouth—small, involuntary.

The woman finally switched off the blender, the sharp buzzing and rattling of the blades quieting instantly. She poured half of the green concoction into the glass, closing it with a lid Wendy hadn’t noticed. “You want some?”

Her nose wrinkled. “Is there mint in it?”

A smirk played across Romanoff's lips. “Yes. Dealbreaker?”

Wendy nodded fervently. “Yes. But thank you.”

“I usually warm up around now,” Romanoff added, tone softening. “Yoga. Or tai chi. Depends on what the day needs.”

Wendy’s hand tightened slightly around the fabric of her sleeve.

“It’s not mandatory,” Romanoff said, like she could feel the shift in her posture. “But you’re welcome to join me. Doesn’t involve hitting anything. Or anyone. Promise.”

Wendy hovered a beat longer, then nodded. 

Romanoff walked out of the kitchen without another word. Wendy rushed to follow, unsure what else she was supposed to do. Romanoff led her back through the living area and down another hallway, this one lit by the large floor-to-ceiling windows that had been covered by curtains in other rooms. She realized, with a small start, that the walls angled slightly inward.  Of course. The building wasn’t straight—the Tower’s angular design. The windows were just following it.

The hallway opened into a wide, empty room. It didn’t look like it had a real purpose yet. A few boxes were stacked in the corner, old and scuffed. One was labeled “LENOX HILL” in fading marker. Another, in a different handwriting altogether, said “FOR CAP’S EYES ONLY.” The tape was peeling.

“I’d bring you down to the gym, but I’m pretty sure Steve and Clint are in there right now,” Romanoff said. She nudged a box toward the center of the room with her foot, then set her drink on top like it was a table.

And that was it. No warm-up speech. No explanation. Just movement.

She started with a stretch and then another. Her body folded and flowed without noise or tension, every motion anchored in breath. It was not aggressive, not soft, either—just steady, intentional movement.

Wendy watched.

Then she tried.

Her movements were off. Too quick in places, too stiff in others. Her center of gravity wobbled. She didn’t know where to look. But Romanoff didn’t correct her. Didn’t adjust her arms or tilt her chin. She stayed on her own side of the room and let Wendy find the rhythm on her own.

Eventually, her breathing caught up with the motions. Her feet felt grounded. Her shoulders dropped, fraction by fraction. The room stopped echoing in her head so loudly.

The static didn’t vanish. But it quieted.

Soon, she recovered her center of balance. It had been months since she had any sort of workout routine. The crushing wave of exhaustion that had befallen her at the Jack-Box severely inhibited her will to keep herself on a schedule, to stay up-to-date on her strength and agility.

Her hands ebbed and flowed in the space around her, anchoring her to the here and now. 

Romanoff stilled first. A long inhale, then a slower exhale, arms drifting back to her sides. She didn’t speak. Just nodded slightly, like the air had shifted in a way only she could sense.

Wendy followed a beat later, ending in something that was almost a mirror of the same stance—feet steady, arms loose, breath even. She was starting to understand why it helped. It didn’t feel like a fight. It felt like a pause.

Then a voice, casual and dry, floated in from behind.

“Well. That was fun.”

Wendy startled, half-turning, her spine going tight again.

Tony leaned against the doorframe like he’d been there a while. Maybe he had. He was barefoot, for some reason, in dark pants and a long-sleeve shirt that looked like it had seen a lot of stress and not enough folding. Another mug dangled from one hand. The other rubbed at his temple like he wasn’t quite sure how he got here.

“How long were you standing there?” Romanoff asked without turning around. Wendy suspected that the agent knew he had been there the whole time and that she was simply acknowledging his presence.

Tony sipped from his mug. “Long enough to regret not filming it for posterity.” He looked at Wendy then, not unkind. “You’ve got better form than me. And I’ve got the yoga app with the Australian voice. Sounds like he surfs professionally when he’s not lecturing me about inner peace.”

Wendy blinked at him. Her heart still hadn’t quite settled, but he wasn’t teasing her exactly. Just talking. The way he always did—like everything might be a joke, but none of it was pointed.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said.

“That’s because I’m stealthy when I’ve had caffeine.” He raised the mug like a toast, then immediately made a face. “This was supposed to be coffee. It tastes like betrayal.”

“It was green,” Romanoff said blandly. “And not in the coffee maker.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Obviously. I figured you already went through the trouble of making it—why let it go to waste?”

Romanoff took a long swig of her drink. “I added kale and mint to mine, not just spirulina. You ever try that?”

Tony grimaced, “Been there. It sucks.”

At that, Wendy couldn’t fight the grin. It was such a little thing, but it created a kind of bubbly feeling in her chest. It was honestly a little pathetic, being borderline giddy that her father shared her dislike for something.

He let the mug dangle from his fingers as he turned, eyeing both of them. “We’re setting up shop upstairs. Nothing dire. No fire alarms. But it’s one of those 'need-to-know, eyes-only, save-the-world-but-make-it-casual' kinds of meetings.”

Romanoff arched a brow. Wendy caught her head tilting toward her. 

Tony straightened slightly. “We’re pulling together what we know. HYDRA, S.H.I.E.L.D., weird stuff from the last few years that didn’t make sense until you showed up. You’re not obligated. But you’ve got a right to be in the room, if you want to be.”

He paused, then added, “But you’ve got time to shower first if you want. This isn’t the military. We don’t do morning briefings in yesterday’s socks unless it’s a real emergency.”

Romanoff was already nodding, pushing her braid back over her shoulder. “I’ll meet you up there in twenty.”

“Perfect,” Tony said, casual as ever.

She gave Wendy a brief, quiet glance—something small but steady, like a hand on her back without touching. Then she slipped past Tony and padded down the hall, vanishing around the corner without fanfare.

He didn’t say anything right away. Just stayed there, watching the spot where Romanoff had gone, then turning his focus back to Wendy.

“You coming?” he asked. “There’s real coffee up there. Although suddenly, I feel less confident about giving a child coffee. That’s probably bad parenting, right?”

Wendy’s grin had shrunk down, but it hadn’t disappeared. Her lips stayed quirked at the corners. She shrugged lightly. “How would I know?”

Tony smiled, brief but genuine. “Fair.”

He shifted his mug to the other hand, his voice dipping into something closer to sincere.

“No pressure. You come if you’re up for it. If not, I’ll swing back and fill you in. Or let Natasha do it. She’s better at getting to the point.”

He took a few steps toward the elevator, then paused at the threshold, looking back over his shoulder with a faint smile.

“And if you do come, there is coffee. The good kind. No mint. No grass clippings.”

A short pause.

“I checked.”

And then he was walking again—unhurried, unrushed—leaving the door open, not waiting for a decision. Just giving her the space to make one.

She hurried after him.

Tony didn’t comment. Just matched her pace without looking over, the sound of their footsteps muffled by the carpet as they crossed back through the quiet common room and toward the private elevator.

The ride up was smooth and silent. Wendy watched the numbers above the door climb. Eighty-eight. Ninety-one. Ninety-two. The fact that it skipped a couple of floors caught her attention, but not for long. By the time it blinked 93, her stomach had tightened again without her permission.

The doors opened.

The air on this floor was cooler than the one below, but not cold. Still, something in it felt different.

This wasn’t a living space—not really. It wasn’t meant to feel like home. This was the floor where things got done.

The layout reminded her of a museum or a command center—or both. The floors were smooth concrete in some areas and warm-toned wood in others, with slight steps that gave the space a tiered layout—half lab, half war room. The lighting was soft and indirect, set into sleek fixtures tucked between wood-paneled accents and brushed steel. It made the metal glint and the wood glow, and for some reason, that combination made her think of the Captain.

To her left was a wide glass wall overlooking a hangar, where a sleek plane sat idle, its wings tucked like they were resting. Across from that, lining the far wall, was a communications center, its many screens awake but unattended. One blinked through satellite feeds. Another streamed quiet bursts of code in a language she didn’t know. 

The floor seemed empty except for the two of them.

They moved farther in.

The center of the floor was dominated by a dark, curved table that looked both expensive and ancient—wood polished to a low sheen, metal edges softened by time and use. It wasn’t uniform. Six chairs surrounded it, none identical, but all clearly chosen with care. The retro hardware built into the table’s edges looked like something out of an old Arena Club meeting room, but the rest was cutting-edge.

Just ahead, a narrower stairwell led down to a slightly sunken area where more equipment sat idle: a digital map table, stacks of tablets, storage crates with S.H.I.E.L.D. insignias. A giant wall screen covered the far side of the room, blank for now, but clearly designed to spring to life the second anyone needed it.

And above it all, in a narrow skylight, sunlight slanted down at an angle. It had begun letting in the kind of pale light that meant morning had properly arrived. Not sunrise anymore. Morning. Time had moved without her noticing.

She paused halfway down the steps, hands curling loosely at her sides. She hadn’t asked how long she and Romanoff were in that side room, but it must’ve been long enough for the sun to start peaking through the morning clouds.

Tony stopped too, just ahead of her. “Not bad, right?”

Then he pointed toward the corner where a simple coffee bar had been tucked against the wall—glass canisters, ceramic mugs, a polished espresso machine that looked entirely too complicated for civilian use. Simple may have been an overstatement.

“That’s where the good stuff lives,” he said. “No kale allowed past that line.”

He said it lightly, but his tone held less distraction now. Less armor.

“C’mon,” he added, “I’ll show you around.”

Tony didn’t launch into a full tour. He didn’t need to. He pointed things out as they passed—a wall panel that doubled as a secure server hub, a narrow shelf of battered field manuals, a reinforced door that led to the armoury—and then kept moving, as if the details would still be there if she decided to care later. 

He swept a hand toward the central table. “This was supposed to be mission control. Intel drops, strategy briefs, bureaucratic whatever.”

She watched him carefully. He wasn’t reminiscing. This wasn’t a space with memories. He was explaining something that had never happened. A blueprint, not a past.

“You never used it?” she asked, voice quiet in the large room.

Tony shook his head. “Not once.”

She looked again at the untouched chairs, the dormant wall screen, the faint hum of waiting tech. No jackets slung over seats. No mug rings. The air still smelled like sawdust and steel polish. Not lived-in. Not even visited.

“What changed?” she asked, though she was already pretty sure of the answer.

Tony moved to the table and braced his hands on it, gaze fixed on the wood like the grain held a blueprint.

“Yesterday,” he said.

Then he straightened, shrugging as if to lighten it. “And besides, we’ve only all lived together for, like, five days.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Seriously?”

“Yep.” He gestured around them. “Now this floor—the one we haven’t touched—is officially ours. No S.H.I.E.L.D., no strings. We decide how it works.”

There was no pride in it. No victory. Just the sharp edge of reality settling in.

“JARVIS can keep us off radar for now,” he added. “Comms are closed-loop. Access points are unlisted. Technically, this whole level doesn’t exist. You won’t find it on any floor plan that wasn’t written by me.”

Instead, she took a step closer to the table, fingers brushing the smooth edge. It wasn’t warm. But it didn’t feel cold either. Just ready.

“You built all this,” she said, not quite a question.

Tony glanced at her, then shrugged, “Started it after New York. Finished it last month.”

He didn’t add just in case. He didn’t have to.

Wendy glanced toward the dark wall screen, then back to Tony.

“You’re going to fight them from here.”

“We’re going to figure out who they are,” he said. “And then we’ll decide how to fight.”

It was subtle, the we . Not thrown at her like a lifeline. Not forced into the air like an expectation. Just said aloud, like something he was already getting used to.

She looked around once more. The tiered floor. The skylight. The plane below the glass wall, wings tucked like it was sleeping. All of it waiting.

She stayed quiet for a long moment.

Then she nodded.

Tony tapped the espresso machine behind him. “C’mon,” he said, more gently now. “You want to see if this thing works better when we’re technically committing treason?”

“Is that what we’re doing?” she asked, stepping closer. “Committing treason?”

Her voice didn’t carry any fear—just curiosity, like she was testing the word against her tongue.

Tony gave a short, one-shouldered shrug. “Depends who’s asking. But yeah. Probably.”

She stopped a pace or two from the counter, looking up at the machine like it might bite.

Then she smiled. Grimly.

“I actually don’t like coffee.”

Tony blinked, then gestured toward the machine like it had personally offended him. “What?”

She put her hands out to the sides of her shoulders, shrugging. “I had to drink it on an assignment, and it was disgusting. I don’t even like the smell.”

Tony looked scandalized. “Wow. And here I was, thinking we were building trust.”

She tried to smile, but the edges of it didn’t quite hold. For a second, she regretted saying anything at all. The memory of that assignment—the sour taste of burnt coffee, the way it clung to her breath and settled in her stomach like ash—wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was no one telling her she could say no.

They never did.

For a brief moment, she braced for Tony to make a joke that didn’t land or to brush her off entirely. That was usually the way of it—say something real, get rewarded with distance. The man seemed very passionate about his drinks, and she doubted something this small could change his opinion of her, but the insecure voice in her mind whispered anyway, but what if it did?

But he didn’t laugh, and he didn’t retreat.

He just leaned a hip against the counter, considering her for a moment. Then, with a small, unbothered nod, he tapped the espresso machine once like a dismissed idea.

“Well, then it’s a good thing we’ve got options,” he said. “Tea, hot chocolate. Sparkling water. No mandatory beverages on this floor. Yet.”

She blinked, a little unsure whether he was serious.

Tony tilted his head slightly, like he could read the hesitation. “We’ll workshop it. Maybe install a juice bar. Or a cocoa station. I’m flexible.”

That pulled the smile from her properly this time—small, but real.

She glanced around the space again. The long table, the empty chairs, the stillness of it all—it seemed to be waiting.

“This floor,” she said, “you made it for the team?”

He nodded once. “That was the idea.”

“But you’ve never used it before.”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t build it for S.H.I.E.L.D.”

It wasn’t a question.

Tony smiled faintly—wry and tired, but honest. “God, no.”

He folded his arms loosely, letting his gaze drift toward the skylight. “Fury got us through New York. But he still had bosses. Strings. This—” he motioned around the space, “—was built for the days when the strings might pull the wrong way.”

“And those days are now.”

“Starting yesterday.”

There wasn’t triumph in his voice when he said it. No swagger. Just the weight of a decision that couldn’t be undone.

She looked back at the table. It was too clean. Too untouched.

“Does the rest of the team know that yet?”

Tony looked at her, his expression unreadable.

“They will.”

The elevator opened with a soft chime, and Tony glanced over his shoulder.

The Captain stepped out first.

He wasn’t in uniform—just dark jeans and a thermal henley, sleeves pushed to his forearms—but he carried himself the same way he had yesterday. No visible weapons. No helmet. Still, unmistakably a soldier. He carried a dark canvas jacket that looked like it had seen better days.

Behind him came Romanoff and Barton. The archer had two plastic containers stacked in his arms, and Romanoff looked almost normal—a tan leather jacket covering her arms, some kind of soft grey t-shirt underneath, and skinny jeans. Her boots clicked pleasingly as she walked across the floor. 

Wendy suddenly realised she was only wearing socks on her feet.

The Captain took in the room as he entered with the quiet alertness of someone cataloging exits and vantage points.

His gaze landed on Tony, then moved to Wendy.

He offered a small nod. “Morning.”

She returned the nod, watching him closely.

“You two get a head start?” The Captain asked, looking between them.

“Technically,” Tony said, “I’ve been up since five. But emotionally, I’m still in bed.”

The Captain raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t be shy, kids,” Tony called, walking over to the stack of tablets. “Take a seat, any seat. Get comfy. There’s coffee, tea, et cetera.”

“I brought donuts,” Barton said, placing the containers on the table. “Feel free to help yourselves.”

Wendy didn’t lean over to look at the pastries, but they did smell nice. 

As the others settled into their seats, Tony pressed a few buttons on his tablet, bringing up a database of some kind, probably S.H.I.E.L.D.’s. “Alright, here’s where things get interesting,” he said, tapping on the screen. “What we know so far is the tip of the iceberg.”

Wendy remained standing, her arms crossed, but she didn’t take her eyes off Tony. She’d already given them the vital pieces of the puzzle, even if she hadn’t figured it all out herself.

“What do we know about Project Paperclip?” the Captain said. He leaned back in his chair, angled toward the two agents.

“Not much,” Romanoff said. “After World War II, S.H.I.E.L.D. recruited German scientists with strategic value.”

“Most of those files are gonna be hard copy,” Barton said, running a hand over his forehead. “You might be able to find something with JARVIS, but it's unlikely. S.H.I.E.L.D. is pretty behind in updating their digital files.”

“That’s probably deliberate,” the Captain muttered. “Why upload something that could expose them?”

Tony swiped at the tablet, pulling up a grainy black-and-white photo of men in coats shaking hands, their faces half-shadowed. “Operation Paperclip was their golden ticket,” he said, his voice sharp with focus. “They brought in Nazi brainiacs—rocketry, chemistry, cryptography—and gave ’em a clean slate. S.H.I.E.L.D. got tech; HYDRA got a foothold.”

Wendy’s stomach shifted, a sour twist she couldn’t shake. The Academy had drilled history into her—twisted versions where HYDRA’s victories were inevitable, their enemies weak. Paperclip had been a footnote, a smug nod to their cunning. She shifted her weight, the concrete biting into her soles, grounding her against the memory.

“So we start there,” the Captain said, his gaze flicking to Tony. “If HYDRA’s roots go back that far, some of those scientists could’ve been theirs from the jump.”

Romanoff nodded, a gentle curl falling over her face as she leaned forward. “We need names. Locations. Where they worked, where they went after S.H.I.E.L.D. cut them loose.”

“JARVIS can cross-reference what’s digitized,” Tony said, tapping the screen again. A list scrolled up—names in stark white against a dark blue field. “But Clint’s right—most of this is buried in paper. Old bases, storage sites, whatever’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s analog archives.”

Barton snorted, leaning back with his arms crossed. “Good luck. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s got stashes all over—D.C., LA, London, Berlin. Probably half of ’em are off the books.”

Berlin. The name hit Wendy like a slap, sharp and sudden. Her fingers tightened against her arms, nails digging into the jumper’s sleeves. She could still feel the weight of that device in her hands, small and cold, the handler’s voice barking orders in her ear. Her breath caught, shallow and quick, but she kept her face still, her eyes on the table.

“Then we narrow it down,” the Captain said, his tone firm, cutting through the hum of her thoughts. “Start with the big hubs—D.C. for headquarters, Berlin for Europe. If HYDRA was pulling strings, they’d have assets close to power.”

“Berlin’s a solid bet,” Romanoff added, her voice cool but pointed. “Post-war, it was a hotbed for espionage. S.H.I.E.L.D. had a field office there starting in the ‘60s—HYDRA could’ve piggybacked off it.”

Tony’s fingers paused on the tablet, his head tilting slightly. “One thing at a time. JARVIS, pull up anything on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Berlin ops—bases, personnel, anything tied to Paperclip.” His eyes flicked to Wendy, a quick glance she almost missed. “Might jog something loose.”

“Processing now, sir,” JARVIS replied, his voice smooth overhead. The hologram shifted, spitting out a map dotted with red markers—Berlin pulsing like a wound.

“It wasn’t just German scientists,” Wendy said quietly. Heads turned to her, so she continued. “Dr. Zola was Swiss. Fenhoff was Russian. Wernher von Braun was recruited, too, but he wasn’t HYDRA.”

The room was quiet, everyone staring at her. Their gazes weighed heavily on her skin, and she felt compelled to justify herself. 

“I’m just saying—there were nearly 1,500 scientists recruited during a twenty-year period. Some of them were legitimate.”

“That’s why we’re not acting on any of this yet,” the Captain said, his tone firm. “We build our case. We verify, and then we act. We don’t want a firefight with S.H.I.E.L.D. on our hands.”

Tony nodded, tapping on the tablet again, a list of names flashing up. “And for that, we have Wendy.” He turned slightly toward her, his gaze softening for a brief moment before going back to the screen. “She’s the one who knows their moves, their tactics. Everything she’s been through has put her in the perfect position to help us track where HYDRA’s been.”

The Captain gave Wendy a nod, his expression more encouraging than usual. “We’ll need you to walk us through the last few years. Give us a timeline of what they’ve been up to.”

She shifted uneasily. “It’s not that simple. I was a student, not an operative. They sent me on a couple of assignments, but I wasn’t required to have all the information. All they wanted was my compliance.”

Romanoff leaned forward, her voice steady but not unkind. “Even small details can help. Locations, names, anything that stood out to you. You’d be surprised what can lead us to something bigger.”

Wendy’s jaw tightened, her mind pulling up a clouded memory she hadn’t touched in a while. “There was a mission in Berlin, about two years ago. They had me plant a device in a government building. I didn’t know what it was for, but the handler mentioned something about ‘clearing the way’ for a bigger operation.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Anyone have any ideas?”

Romanoff nodded. “A high-ranking diplomat was assassinated. Clean, professional. No witnesses. Looked like a heart attack.”

“JARVIS, find us the diplomat,” Tony instructed, arms crossed, his fingers spinning a pen.

A holographic video flickered to life above the table, displaying a man with greying hair, glasses, and a stern demeanor. Wendy briefly wondered how the hologram remained clear from every angle, but her attention snapped to the man’s recorded words: “Freiheit ist kein Geschenk; sie ist eine Verantwortung. Wir müssen sie entschlossen schützen, denn einmal aufgegeben, wird sie selten zurückgewonnen.”

“Freedom is not a gift; it is a responsibility,” the AI translated. “We must guard it fiercely, for once surrendered, it is rarely reclaimed.”

“‘Berlin Mourns Sudden Death of Privacy Advocate’,” Barton said, looking down at his tablet. “He was the pioneer behind the ‘Berlin Accord on Digital Freedom,’ a proposed international agreement to limit surveillance overreach and protect individual rights.”

Wendy’s stomach twisted as the hologram of Dr. Matthias Brandt flickered above the table. His words— Freedom is not a gift; it is a responsibility —hung in the air. “I think… I think I was part of that. Not directly, but setting it up.”

Romanoff swiped the video to the side, revealing an image of the man: greying hair, glasses, a stern expression on his face. “Fury sent in an agent to verify the M.E. report, but I didn’t hear what they found.”

Wendy didn’t have to look at any report to know the man didn’t die of a heart attack.

“Two rounds to the chest,” she heard herself say, the words falling out without her permission, her voice flat, detached, as if someone else were speaking. “Soviet-made. No rifling.” 

The room went still. Romanoff’s green eyes snapped to her, sharp as a blade, piercing through the haze of Wendy’s thoughts. 

“The Soldier?” Her voice was low, almost a hiss.

“Woah, wait—” Tony’s voice cut through the stillness like a whipcrack. He stepped forward, planting both hands on the table, leaning in with a mix of confusion and impatience. “The Soldier? Who the hell’s the Soldier ?”

Romanoff didn’t break eye contact with Wendy, her gaze unyielding, pinning her in place. When she spoke, her tone was steady, deliberate, but there was a jagged edge beneath it—something dark and personal. “Most of the intelligence community doesn’t believe he exists. The ones that do call him the Winter Soldier. He’s credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years .”

The Captain’s brow furrowed, his arms crossing as he leaned back slightly. His voice was calm but laced with skepticism. “So he’s a ghost story.”

Romanoff’s jaw tightened, a flicker of something—anger, maybe, or pain—crossing her face. She took a slow breath, her eyes finally shifting from Wendy to the Captain. “Five years ago, I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot at my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there.” Her hand moved to the hem of her shirt, hesitating for a split second, fingers brushing the fabric as if it burned. Then she lifted it, revealing a jagged scar snaking across her abdomen, pale and brutal against her skin. “I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me. Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye-bye bikinis.”

The air in the room thickened, pressing down like a physical weight. Wendy’s gaze locked on the scar, her stomach lurching. The edges of her vision blurred, and a chill seeped into her, deep and unshakeable. She didn’t remember the Winter Soldier—not his face, not his voice—but her body did. Her chest tightened, her breath coming in shallow bursts as if the room were running out of oxygen. 

Rumours of his escapades spread like wildfire through the halls of the Academy. There were some who wanted to be the next Soldier, wanted to be ‘tapped’ for the Winter Soldier Program. Others wanted to work alongside “the greatest weapon of our generation” . A few of the more scientifically inclined were “deeply inspired” by his programming and wanted to work in the Compliance Program. Every time the moniker was mentioned, she felt her throat close up. Like a cold, metal noose.

Romanoff let the shirt fall back into place, her voice dropping to a near-whisper, heavy with finality. “Going after him is a dead end. I know—I’ve tried.”

“The Winter Soldier is HYDRA’s greatest weapon,” Wendy breathed. Her throat closed up, the weight of their stares pressing against her. The Winter Soldier . The name burrowed into her, stirring a fear she couldn’t name—a fear that felt like a memory she’d never lived. Her hands shook harder now, and she pressed them against her thighs, willing them to stop. “He’s the equivalent of taking an eraser to a page.”

A storm was brewing in her chest as the words slipped out, heavy and final: “They send him after the highest-value targets: President Kennedy, the Starks, Dr. Banner…” Her voice trailed off, a whisper lost in the sudden, suffocating silence. 

She hadn’t meant to say it like that—so casual, so careless —but it was just another fact drilled into her at the Academy, a piece of HYDRA’s proud history she’d assumed they all knew. Her gaze flicked up, expecting nods or grim acknowledgment, but the room was a frozen tableau, all eyes locked on her.

Tony’s face had gone slack, the color draining from it like water spilling from a cracked glass. His hands, braced on the table, trembled faintly—barely noticeable, but to Wendy, it was a scream. 

“What did you say?” he rasped, his voice raw, barely more than a breath. His eyes pinned her, wide and unblinking, and the air between them turned brittle, sharp enough to cut.

“I-I thought you knew,” she stammered, her words tripping over each other, frantic now. “They told us it wasn’t an accident. They said it was him—the Winter Soldier. That he… he killed them.” Her hands pressed harder against her thighs, nails digging into the soft fabric of the joggers, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. Her chest heaved, shallow and quick, as if the oxygen had thinned.

She’d grown up with it drilled into her: the Starks’ deaths were a triumph, a lesson in precision, not some tragic fluke. How could Tony not know it wasn’t an accident?

Tony didn’t move. Didn’t blink. His gaze bore into her, and she couldn’t tell if it was anger or something worse—something broken. Then, abruptly, he shoved back from the table, the chair beside him scraping loud and jagged against the floor. The sound ricocheted in her skull, a gunshot in the stillness. He turned and walked out, his steps uneven, hands clenched into fists at his sides. The door to the stairwell slammed shut behind him, a dull thud that echoed in her bones.

She couldn’t breathe. The air was too thick, too warm, pressing against her ribs. Her vision blurred at the edges, the hologram of Brandt still flickering above the table like a ghost she’d summoned. She’d done this—shattered something with Tony before it could even take root. Her fault. Her stupid mouth.

The Captain’s voice broke through the haze, low and firm, but she barely registered it. “Wendy.” He stepped into her line of sight, his broad frame blocking the hologram’s glow. His blue eyes were steady, but there was a shadow in them—something old, something heavy. “You didn’t know.”

She nodded, a jerky motion, but it didn’t feel true. She should’ve known. Should’ve seen the cracks in the man’s armor, the way he flinched when she said it. Her hands unclenched, then clenched again, the dampness of her palms soaking into the joggers. The room smelled of coffee and metal, sharp and bitter, and it made her stomach lurch again. 

She’d assumed it was common knowledge, a fact etched into their world as deeply as it was into hers, but Tony’s face—pale, hollow, lost—told her she’d been wrong. Horribly wrong.

The faint hum of the tower buzzed in her ears, a reminder of where she was—safe, supposedly—but it didn’t feel like it. Not now. She’d broken something with Tony, and the pieces were still falling, sharp and jagged around her. The Winter Soldier’s name hung in the air, a spectre she couldn’t shake, and she wondered if he’d haunt her forever—or if she’d just made sure he’d haunt Tony too.

Chapter Text

The stairwell door slammed shut, a dull boom ricocheting off the concrete walls like a cannon shot in a tomb. 

Tony’s boots scuffed the steps—too fast, uneven—his fists clenched so tight his knuckles burned white-hot, the sting a lifeline to keep him from spinning out completely. He didn’t care. His chest heaved, lungs clawing at air that came in sharp, useless bursts, the arc reactor humming a steady taunt against his ribs. 

He didn’t know where he was going—down, away, anywhere but back there, where Wendy’s voice still clawed at his skull: “They told us it wasn’t an accident. They said it was him—the Winter Soldier.”

He hit the first landing—Floor 92—and stopped, slamming a palm against the railing, the cold metal biting back like a slap. His forehead pressed into the wall, rough concrete scraping his skin, and he muttered, “Great job, Tony. Missed the biggest conspiracy in your own damn house.” The sarcasm was there, brittle as glass, cracking under the weight of what she’d dropped. 

Howard and Maria, dead. Not in a ditch because his old man couldn’t lay off the scotch, not some tragic footnote to Stark excess—but murdered. Taken out by some Soviet shadow with a gun and a fancy codename. The Winter Soldier. What a fucking joke—straight out of a B-rated Cold War movie, except it wasn’t funny. Not even close.

His laugh came out choked, bitter, bouncing off the walls like a ricochet. Genius, philanthropist, clueless idiot. Twenty years—twenty goddamn years—he’d carried it like a badge: Howard Stark, the bastard who crashed his legacy into a tree, Maria collateral damage to his ego. Every fight, every bottle Tony threw back in his face, every “you’ll never be him” he spat—it was built on sand. 

A car crash. That’s what the cops said, what the papers printed, what Tony swallowed whole because why wouldn’t he? Howard was a drunk, a control freak who’d rather die than admit he was wrong. Case closed.

Except it wasn’t. Wendy knew. Wendy knew, and she’d said it like it was nothing—like it was just another bullet point on HYDRA’s brag sheet. “President Kennedy, the Starks, Dr. Banner…” Like they were trophies on a shelf, his parents were sandwiched between a dead president and a gamma-fried scientist, which he really couldn’t give any focus to right now. He’d deal with it later.

The ones on his mind threatened to crush him. His mom, who’d hum Sinatra in the kitchen, who’d bandage his scraped knees with that soft smile, who’d whisper, “You’re alright, Tony” when Howard wouldn’t. His dad, who’d bark orders and build empires and never once say he was proud—gone, not by accident, but by design. Erased. 

He pushed off the wall, stumbled down—Floor 91, 90—each step heavier, boots scuffing, the echo a dull thud in the empty stairwell. His vision swam, the edges blurring, and he gripped the railing tighter, metal creaking under his hand. He should probably fix that.

December ’91 hit like shrapnel—21, freshly orphaned, drowning in a life he didn’t want. The phone call: “Mr. Stark, there’s been an accident on the Long Island Expressway.” He’d hung up, grabbed a wrench, and locked himself in the workshop. No suit, no tie, just Metallica on blast and a bottle of Jack, the bass drowning out the silence. Funeral invites piled up—black envelopes, gold script—and he didn’t touch them. Couldn’t face the mahogany caskets, the priest’s drone, the pitying stares. Howard didn’t deserve tears, he’d told himself; Maria would’ve gotten it. He soldered a circuit that did nothing, hands shaking, the lie already settling in.

Then Obie—big hands, bigger voice—stepping in like a savior. “I’ve got it, son,” he’d said, clapping Tony’s shoulder, steering him away from the wreckage. Obie arranged it all—closed caskets, private service, Stark Industries footing the bill. Tony didn’t go, stayed holed up in the lab, but Obie called after: “You should’ve been there, Tony. They’d have wanted it.”

Then he was at the mansion, yanking Tony off the couch, shoving a suit in his hands. “Time to step up, kid. SI needs you.” Tony was half-drunk, slurring, “I’m not ready” , but Obie wouldn’t hear it—pushing contracts, board meetings, a legacy Tony didn’t want. Obie was the lifeline, the only one who stayed, and Tony clung to it, too numb to see the strings.

“You’re tougher than Howard, son,” Obie’d said, that smirk tugging his lips, molding Tony into something useful—CEO at 21, a crown he never asked for.

Weeks blurred—parties, women, men, a haze of scotch and denial. No tears, not one, because crying meant it was real. He saw the crash in his head—headlights, twisted metal—but now it was a gun, a shadow, two slugs. He didn’t know. Didn’t look.

All the mirrors around him had shown red eyes, hollow cheeks; he laughed it off: “Stark legacy, baby.” Obie was there too, always there— “You’ve got this, Tony” —pushing him toward the boardroom, shaping him into the face of SI while Tony stumbled through the fog.

Three weeks in, Rhodey found him sprawled on the mansion floor, bottle rolling, barely breathing. Tony swung, slurred, “Get off me” , but Rhodey pinned him, arms like steel. 

“You’re not dying on my watch, asshole.”  

Tony had broken—sobs tearing out, messy and loud, soaking Rhodey’s shoulder, a flood he’d never let out since. Rhodey held tight, didn’t let go until the storm passed, until Tony was alive again.

He slid down now—Floor 89, maybe 88, who cared—ass hitting the step, head dropping into his hands. The stairwell smelled like dust and steel, sharp in his nose, and his laugh was harsh, broken. Perfect. Tony Stark, king of missing the obvious.

Obie wasn’t saving him—he was shaping him. Wendy’s voice cut deeper: “HYDRA is everywhere. Not just the government. Here. In Stark Industries. They were responsible for Mr. Stark’s kidnapping in Afghanistan—”

“The Ten Rings perpetrated the attack—”

“—hired by Obadiah Stane, who was a member of HYDRA.”

Obie was HYDRA. Afghanistan was Obie—those Ten Rings bastards didn’t grab him by chance; it was a setup, a play. That, he’d known. And now—the crash? His stomach lurched, bile scorching his throat. Was it Obie’s call? Did he greenlight the Winter Soldier, clear the board, and install a 21-year-old Tony as a malleable kingpin for Stark Industries? A puppet too drunk on grief to see the puppeteer, too young to fight back?

He saw it—Obie’s smirk over a cigar, “You’re the future, Tony,” while Howard’s blood dried on a Long Island road. The funeral he planned—closed caskets, no questions—hiding bullet holes, not crash wounds. Tony’s hands shook, fingers digging into his scalp, pulling at his hair. 

Was it you, you bastard?  

Did Obie sit across from him at board meetings, sign deals, laugh at his jokes, all while knowing— planning —it? 

Afghanistan was Act Two—kill the kid when he stopped bending—but the crash was the opening shot. Get Howard out, put Tony in, steer the empire into HYDRA’s hands. Malleable. Suggestive. Perfect.

His breath hitched, a ragged choke, and he punched the step once, twice—concrete biting his knuckles, pain flaring hot and bright. 

“Son of a bitch,” he rasped, voice cracking, blood smearing his hand. He couldn’t face Wendy—not like this, a live grenade with the pin pulled. She knew —raised on HYDRA’s victories, reciting his parents’ deaths like a history quiz—while he’d been blind, blaming the wrong man, drowning in the wrong guilt. The Winter Soldier was the gun, but Obie—Obie might’ve been the trigger.

But behind the anger, the desperate rage and decades-old grief tearing his chest open again, was the knowledge that he could not let his daughter see this side of him. Under any circumstances.

He slumped back, head thumping the wall, chest heaving. The stairwell spun—cold, gray, endless—and his mind wouldn’t stop. Howard’s last words— “You’ll understand someday” —weren’t about legacy; maybe they were a warning he’d missed. Maria’s hug— “Be good, Tony” —a plea he’d failed. Obie’s push— “Step up, son” —a leash he’d worn. And Wendy’s edict— “They said it was him” —the key he’d never wanted.

The war room felt like a held breath after Tony bolted—Wendy pale and trembling, Natasha’s eyes cutting through her, Clint staring at the table like it might splinter. Steve paced, boots scuffing the concrete, arms crossed tight over his chest. Tony’s exit rang in his ears, a signal flare he couldn’t ignore.

He’d seen that fracture before: Coulson’s blood on the helicarrier deck, Tony’s quips masking the hurt, and Steve had tracked him down then—attempted to provide solace, hammering sense into an unreceptive genius. This was the same. Tony was breaking, strings cut, and Steve wouldn’t let him fall alone.

He grabbed his jacket—dark canvas, frayed at the elbows—and headed for the stairwell, bypassing the elevator’s hum. Tony wouldn’t glide down smooth; he’d take the hard way, burn the chaos out step by step. The door clanged shut, the stairwell’s chill slapping his face—gray concrete, steel railings, a faint whine of vents overhead. He moved fast, boots steady, ears straining. 

Floor 93, 92, 91—he caught it: a ragged breath, a muttered curse, the dull thud of fist on stone.

Floor 89. Tony was slumped there, head in his hands, blood streaking his knuckles, dark hair plastered against his forehead. The arc reactor glowed mutedly through his shirt, a steady pulse in the dim light. 

Steve paused, three steps up, taking him in. Tony looked like a soldier after a lost battle—shoulders hunched, jaw clenched, sober as a judge but shaking like the strings had snapped. No bottle, no haze—just Tony Stark, raw and unmoored, a puppet cut loose from the master’s hand.

“Tony,” Steve said, voice firm, not soft—a check-in, not a cradle. He’d seen enough foxholes to know his showing up would light Tony’s fuse, but there was no way in hell Steve was leaving now. 

Tony’s head snapped up, eyes red and wild, glinting like a cornered animal’s. “Get out, Rogers,” he snarled, voice a jagged blade, rough from the gut. “I don’t need a babysitter. Go salute something upstairs.” He flung a bloody hand out—sharp, shoving air—dismissing him like a stray dog. His laugh was a bark, bitter and short. “What, you draw the short straw? Captain America to the rescue?”

Tony’s venom was just a wounded man’s flail. He’d thrown his fair share Bucky’s way hundreds of times growing up. He stepped down, boots thudding deliberate, and sat a step above, hands clasped tight between his knees. 

“Not leaving,” he said, flat and final, eyes locked on Tony’s. “You’re a mess. Hit me if you want, but you’re not staying here alone.”

Tony’s glare could’ve melted steel. “Screw you, Cap,” he spat, lunging forward, stopping short like a tether jerked him. “I don’t need your G.I. Joe crap. Back off.” He punched the step—hard, twice—blood welling fresh, knuckles splitting wider. “I’ve been choking on a lie for twenty goddamn years.”

Steve’s gut tightened—the image of Howard and his wife floating forward in his mind—but he kept his face steady, a soldier’s mask. “I heard her,” he said, voice level, cutting through the storm. “You’ve got the truth now. What’s the move?”

Tony’s laugh was a jagged shard, head slamming back against the wall. “Next move? I don’t know, Cap. Hunt a ghost? Blow something up?” His voice broke, raw and ragged, and he scrubbed his face, smearing blood like war paint. “Obie knew. That bastard knew. Set up the funeral, shoved me into SI—HYDRA’s golden boy. Was it his call? Did he sic that shadow on them to make me a puppet?” His eyes hit Steve’s, wide and frantic, begging for a no. “Tell me I’m losing it.”

Steve’s jaw tightened—puppetry, the word sank like a slug in mud. He’d seen it: Zola’s labs, Bucky’s blank stare when he found him in Azzano, HYDRA pulling strings ’til men weren’t men anymore. Tony wasn’t losing it; he was waking up to the rigging. 

“You’re not,” Steve said, low and sure, a rifle’s report. “HYDRA’s got a playbook—puppets on long leashes. If they had it then, they have it now. If Stane was theirs, it tracks.” Obadiah Stane, master of the show—funeral a stage, Tony a prop, dancing blind while the curtain hid the blood.

Silence fell—thick, cold—Tony’s breaths tearing out, Steve’s even as a drumbeat. Minutes dragged, the stairwell a foxhole holding them tight. 

Tony sagged, elbows on his knees, staring at the blood crusting his hands. “I can’t go back up,” he muttered, voice a ghost. “Not yet. She knew, Steve. She knew .”

“She didn’t know it’d cut you down,” Steve said, firm but quiet. “She’s tangled in their lines, same as you were.” He nodded at Tony’s hands, blood pooling dark. “Let me patch those. You’re no use bleeding out.”

Tony’s head snapped up, eyes blazing. “Don’t touch me,” he growled, yanking his hands back like Steve’s were fire. “I don’t need your damn pity, Rogers. I’m not some grunt you can fix with a bandage and a pep talk.” He flexed his fingers, wincing sharply, blood streaking the step. “Leave it.”

Steve held still, hands open—not pushing, not retreating. He’d patched too many boys in the Ardennes, Bucky, after a brawl—he knew when to wait. 

“Not pity,” he said, voice a low thud. “Practicality. You’re no good to anyone busted up.” He tore a strip from his jacket lining—rough, gray, a field dressing—and held it out, eyes steady. “Your call.”

Tony glared, chest heaving, then slumped, fight bleeding out. “Fine,” he muttered, thrusting his hands forward like a dare. “Knock yourself out, Doc.” His tone dripped acid, but he didn’t pull away as Steve wrapped the knuckles, slow and sure—blood staining through, a soldier’s fix. Steve’s hands moved steadily, muscle memory from muddy camps, tying off the knots tight.

“Better?” Steve asked, voice clipped, checking the work.

“Thrilling,” Tony rasped, flexing his hands, wincing hard. “Still crap.” He leaned back, exhaling rough, and shot Steve a look—less fire, more ash. “You’re a stubborn bastard, Rogers.”

“Part of the job,” Steve said, a faint twitch at his mouth—closest he’d get to a smile here. He stood, stepping back a pace, giving Tony room. “You’re still in one piece. Why don't you go to the lab? You need to breathe, not bleed.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed, jaw working like he’d snap again, but he just stared—hands flexing, blood crusting under the gray wrap. “Not going back up there,” he muttered, voice thin, a wall still up. He pushed off the step, swaying a beat, then nodded sharply. “Lab. Fine. Lead the way, soldier boy.”

Steve didn’t argue—Tony was moving, that was enough. He kept a step ahead, boots steady, as they climbed to 91, Tony shuffling behind, breaths still jagged but slowing. The lab door hissed open—Tony’s cave, bright and cluttered, workbenches strewn with tools and half-built ghosts. Tony dropped into a chair, head tipping back, hands resting stiff on his lap like he didn’t trust them—fingers twitching slightly, eyes flicking to the lights, the tools, anywhere but Steve.

Steve leaned on a bench, arms crossed, watching.

Tony shifted, chair creaking, and muttered, “Don’t hover, Rogers. I’m not gonna bolt.” His voice was low, frayed, but the edge was duller now—exhaustion creeping in. He rubbed at the wraps, wincing, then stopped—hands freezing mid-motion like the touch stung more than the cuts. Steve stayed put, eyes steady. He’d seen Tony like this—wired tight, dodging contact—yesterday’s panic attack flashing back: Tony’s gasps, Steve’s arms locking him down ’til he could breathe. This wasn’t that, but it was close—too much noise in his head, too many ghosts.

“Take your time,” Steve said, voice low, a steady beat. “You’re here. That’s a start.” He shifted his weight, boots scuffing faintly, keeping his spot—close enough to hold ground, far enough to let Tony settle. The lab buzzed—bright lights, quiet hum of tech—and Tony’s eyes darted again, tracking a screwdriver on the bench, a blinking panel, like he was mapping an escape he wouldn’t take.

“Obie’s laughing somewhere,” Tony said suddenly, voice a rasp, staring at the ceiling. “Bastard’s probably got a cigar and a front-row seat.” His hands clenched, wraps stretching, then loosened—fingers tapping fast against his thigh, a rhythm Steve didn’t know. “Twenty years a puppet. Should’ve seen it.”

Steve’s chest tightened, but he kept it locked down. “You couldn’t,” he said, firm, no room for doubt.

Tony snorted faintly, eyes still up. “Yeah, well, I’m supposed to be the genius.” His voice cracked, and he scrubbed his face again—stopping short, hands hovering, like even that was too much. He dropped them, tapping faster, breath hitching once before leveling out. “What a show.”

Steve watched the tapping—quick, uneven, a tell he’d seen before when Tony’d dodged a handshake or paced through an idea. On the helicarrier, he’d snapped and clapped his hands in a rhythm that stuck in his head.

Yesterday, he’d held him through worse; now, Tony was holding himself together, barely. 

“Show’s over when you say it is,” Steve said, voice steady, a lifeline tossed quietly. “You’re not dancing for him anymore.”

Tony’s eyes flicked to him—red, sharp, then away—tapping slowing, hands stilling stiff. “Not yet,” he muttered, voice a ghost again, head tipping back heavier. The lab hummed on, bright and cluttered, and Steve stood watch, waiting for the next move.

It didn’t take long.

A soft whine cut the air—the elevator gearing up, a soft rumble Steve’s ears caught before the doors slid open. He glanced over, boots shifting slightly, as Pepper stepped out, heels cracking the floor like rifle shots in the quiet. She stopped dead, mid-stride, jacket slung over one arm—eyes snapping to Tony, taking in the wreck sprawled in the chair. Steve stayed put, arms crossed, reading her: suit crisp, hair tight, but her face twitched—sharp lines softening fast, like she’d walked into a firefight she hadn’t prepped for.

Tony didn’t move—head still back, hands stiff in his lap, the gray wraps stark against his twitchy fingers—but Steve caught the flicker, a smirk tugging thinly at his mouth. 

“Hey, Pep,” Tony rasped, voice rough and thin, no liquor to smooth it. “Caught me mid-performance. Should’ve sold tickets.”

Pepper’s jaw tightened, and she marched forward—heels snapping louder, jacket hitting a bench with a soft thud. “Tony,” she said, voice slicing clean, edged with something raw underneath. She stopped a pace off, hands on her hips, staring him down. “You look like hell. What’s going on?”

Steve watched—her eyes flicked over Tony, clocking the blood, the slump, then darted to him, quick and searching. He gave a short nod—he’s here, he’s talking—and she exhaled, sharp, like she’d been holding it since the elevator. “JARVIS flagged you,” she said, tone biting but fraying. “Said you were ‘stressed.’ This isn’t stressed—this is...” Her hands dropped, one rubbing her temple, the other gesturing vaguely at the mess of him.

Tony’s smirk twitched wider, brittle. “I forgot my lines. Stage fright’s a bitch.” His red and hollow eyes slid towards her. His fingers tapped once—a quick, staccato beat, then stillness. A little spark ignited in his gaze, like he’d found a thread to pull.

Pepper didn’t bite. She stepped closer, voice dropping low, shaking just enough for Steve to catch. “Cut it, Tony. What’s going on?” Her gaze held him, steady now—less fire, more anchor—and Steve saw it: she wasn’t here to drag him up, not yet, just to stand in the rubble.

“Long story,” he muttered, voice a scrape. Tony’s head lolled, a faint groan slipping out, and he scrubbed his face, stopping short, hands hovering like the wraps burned. “Bad script. Worse director.” His eyes flicked to Steve—quick, almost a flinch—then back to her, hands dropping stiff again.

Steve straightened, boots scuffing indistinctly, giving them space. “He’s got the rundown,” he said, voice low, a hand-off. “I’ll step out.” He moved for the door, steady and quiet—Tony was still a mess, but Pepper had the line now. The lab’s hum swallowed his exit, leaving them in the bright clutter.

Chapter Text

She didn’t mean to break the team.

She hadn’t said anything since Tony left—since the chair scraped back hard enough to squeal against the floor, since his footsteps disappeared into the stairwell and left the door open wide behind him, since the Captain followed after him.

She hadn’t moved, either.

Her fingers were curled tight around the edge of the table. The pads of her thumbs pressed into the cracked laminate, tracing the factory-made grain. Every now and then, she remembered to blink.

The silence was too full. It didn’t feel quiet—it felt crowded.

She knew Romanoff and Barton were still there, seated nearby. She hadn’t looked at them. If she looked, they might speak. And if they spoke, she might cry.

And she didn’t want to cry.

She wanted to rewind. Unsay what she’d said. Unhappen everything.

She wanted to shrink back into the wall like she’d done a thousand times before, make herself small and simple and safe. But the wall wouldn’t take her. There was no camouflage here. No corners dark enough.

So she stayed still and tried to disappear through stillness.

Romanoff exhaled softly. The scrape of ceramic on wood followed—someone sliding a mug across the table. Tea. Or something similarly herbal.

“You don’t have to talk,” Romanoff said. Her voice was steady, like it always was. But it felt different now. Too focused. Like someone trying to speak a wild animal back down from the edge of a trap. “But I want you to drink. Just a little.”

Wendy glanced down. Pale steam. A dull green mug. Her fingers twitched, but didn’t move.

She didn’t want tea. She wanted to leave. She wanted to run. She wanted to scream, or throw something, or fall asleep for a thousand years.

But none of those were allowed. So instead, she sat down and she reached for the mug. Her hand was shaking. She didn’t want it to shake.

It touched the handle. She paused. Picked it up. Sipped.

It wasn’t good. But it was warm.

The warmth lodged in her throat and refused to go down properly.

“You did the right thing,” Barton said casually. Too casually. “Telling the truth. No one’s mad at you.”

Wendy didn’t answer.

She wasn’t sure what she’d done. Who decided what the right thing to do was anyway? It hadn’t felt like a choice.

She was so tired of being the secret. The weapon. The experiment .

She swallowed the lump in her throat and let the mug clunk down onto the table harder than she meant to.

Her hands were still shaking.

She pressed them between her knees, knuckles digging into denim. She tried to breathe in—slow, like Romanoff. Like Miss Olivia taught her to.

The breath got stuck halfway.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” she whispered.

“No,” Romanoff said. No hesitation. Just that one word, firm and absolute.

Wendy looked up, finally.

Romanoff was watching her. Not with pity. Not with disappointment. Just watching, like she saw her whole.

Her eyes were green, sharp, unblinking—like they could peel back every layer Wendy had stitched over herself. It wasn’t soft, but it wasn’t cold either. It was steady, and that scared her more than anything. Steady meant she couldn’t hide. Steady meant she was seen.

She didn’t want to be seen.

“You don’t get to take it back,” Romanoff said, voice low but cutting clean. “It’s out. He knows. That’s not on you—it’s on them.” She leaned forward, just a fraction—elbows on her knees, hands clasped. “You’re not the one who pulled the trigger.”

Wendy’s throat tightened, the warmth from the tea turning sour. “I-I made it real.” Her voice cracked, barely there—her fingers pressed harder into her jeans, nails scraping through the fabric. “He didn’t have to know. Not like that. Not so… so callous.”

Barton shifted in his chair, the wood creaking quietly under his weight. “Kid, listen.” His tone was still casual, but there was a thread in it—something warmer. “Tony’s a big boy. He’s been through worse and come out swinging. You didn’t make this—he just didn’t see it coming.” He tapped a finger on the table, slow and deliberate—a beat she could follow if she tried. “Truth sucks. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Wendy’s eyes flicked to him—quick, then away. His face was rougher than Romanoff’s, lines carved deep, but his gaze held steady too. Not sharp like hers—blunter, like a wall she could lean on if she stopped shaking long enough. She didn’t know what to do with that.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said, voice small, eyes dropping to the mug again. The steam was thinning, curling faintly into the air. “I just—I said what they taught me. Like it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing.”

Romanoff’s head tilted, just a touch—watching, still. “No, it wasn’t.” Her voice stayed even, but there was an edge now—something that hooked and pulled. “And that’s why it matters. You’ve got more in there—HYDRA’s wins, their moves. We need that.” 

She didn’t blink, didn’t let Wendy look away. “You’re not just the messenger, Wendy. You’re the map. Start talking.”

Barton nodded, leaning back a little—hands off the table now, resting loose on his thighs. “Yeah, what she said.” His voice softened. “Tony’s not mad at you—he’s mad at the bastards who did it. Stane, the Winter Soldier, whoever else. Give us the rest, kid. We’ll sort it.” He tapped his boot once, twice—another rhythm, steady as his words. “You’re not in this alone.”

Wendy’s breath hitched, caught again—she tried to follow Barton’s tap, match it with her own. Her fingers loosened, just a fraction—knuckles aching where they’d dug in. She missed her boots.

“I don’t know where to start,” she whispered, eyes darting between them. “They—taught us things. They molded us into the perfect subversives.” Her voice shook, but she pushed it out—“Everything happens behind the scenes. The kidnapping in Afghanistan. The stock market crash. The Starks. All of it.” It was as if the room was flickering between the here and now and the Academy, or somewhere else?—List’s notebook, the whir of metal joints, whispers she couldn’t place—mixing with Tony’s footsteps fading down the stairs. “I didn’t mean to make it worse.”

Her breath snagged harder, a sharp stutter—she rocked forward, just once, then back. 

“I didn’t mean it,” she said again, louder, voice splintering. Her hands jerked free from her knees, fingers curling tight—nails bit into her palms now, sharp and hot. “I didn’t— I didn’t— ” 

The words tangled, stuck—the room tilted, too loud, too bright, too everything . The hum of the screens, the faint creak of Barton’s chair, Romanoff’s steady breath—it crashed in, a wave she couldn’t stop. 

“He didn’t know,” she choked, rocking again—forward, back, forward. “I made him see it. I made him—” Her hands flew to her head, pressing hard, trying to hold it in, keep it quiet. “I broke it. I broke him.”

Is this what drowning feels like?

Romanoff was up in a flash—chair scraping softly, boots silent on the floor. She didn’t touch, just stood close—voice low, cutting through: “Wendy. Stop.” It wasn’t harsh, but it was steel—unbending. 

“You’re here. He’s not gone. Breathe.” Her green eyes locked on, steady still—“In. Out. Now.” She tapped her own finger against her thigh, slow—once, twice—a rhythm sharper than Barton’s, a lifeline thrown fast. “You didn’t break him. HYDRA did. Focus on that.”

Barton stayed seated, but his hands tensed on his thighs—eyes flicked to Natasha, then back to Wendy. 

“Hey, kid—hey.” He almost sounded gentle. “You’re okay. It’s loud, right? Messy. But you’re still here.” He leaned forward, just a bit—boots tapping again, steady, grounding. “Tony’s tough—he’s not broken, just pissed. You didn’t do that. They did.” 

He nodded toward her hands, still pressed to her head—“Ease up. Breathe with me. C’mon.” His tone held, warm but firm.

But her chest felt too tight. Too hot.

Her skin itched. Her breath wouldn’t stay where she put it. It kept catching in her ribs, sharp and jagged, like she'd swallowed something broken.

She hadn’t meant to tell them about the trophies. That had slipped out. That shouldn’t have slipped out.

All she had wanted to do was help.

She could still hear the voices—List’s smooth German, Olivia’s cracked soprano, Dr. Steger’s lectures, a faceless woman whispering over needles and screens and cold glass, tightening the restraints around nine-year-old wrists.

The indistinct whispers coming from a source beyond her comprehension. 

The lights in the room were too bright.

Or maybe they weren’t.

Maybe it was her eyes.

She blinked hard, twice, but the buzzing behind her eyes only got louder. Not a sound exactly—more like pressure. Like the space behind her forehead had been pumped full of static.

Her breath hitched again, and this time she couldn’t smooth it out.

“I-I don’t feel right,” she said, clutching her stomach. Her voice came out reedy. “Something’s wrong. Something’s—”

“Wendy.”

Romanoff again. Calm. Firm. A cue.

But the name didn’t settle her like it should’ve. It spun her harder.

That wasn’t her name. Not really. Not the one they called her in the Jack-Box. Not the one they whispered in the halls of the Academy.

“Stop,” she said—too loud this time, hands over her ears like it would stop the sound. There wasn’t any sound.

Barton was standing now. Romanoff was too.

She could feel them watching her. Their shapes moved—blurs against the brighter, buzzing edges of the room.

Jack-Box snapped clearer— “Maria Stark. Echidna patient.” —the scepter’s buzz, the whispers, Tony’s face as he’d bolted.

“I need to go—let me go—” Her voice cracked down the middle. “I said stop—”

The chair slammed backward as she stood—sudden, uncoordinated, too fast. She stumbled and caught the table to keep upright, and that was when the mug shattered.

She hadn’t meant to touch it.

She hadn’t meant to break it.

But the ceramic fell to the floor and cracked like it had been dropped from a rooftop, splinters across the floor, and hot liquid soaked into the seams of her jeans.

Her chest heaved. Her vision narrowed.

Everything was wrong .

Romanoff stepped closer—slow, hands up, voice sharper now: “Wendy. Look at me.” One of the assassin’s hands grasped hers, locking it in a gentle but firm hold. “You’re here. Breathe . In. Out.” Her eyes bored in, green and hard—“HYDRA did this. Not you. Say it.”

But her words hit a wall—Wendy’s rocking sped up. She yanked her hand out of Romanoff’s,  hands pressing tighter to her ears.

“Shall I alert Mr. Stark?”

“No, JARVIS. Not yet.”

Barton moved in—boots scuffing, voice low, nearly pleading. “Kid, c’mon—easy.”

He crouched beside her, hands out. No sudden movements. Just mirroring.

“You’re okay. It’s just a mug. Look at me, huh?”

His eyes flicked to the shards, then back to her—steady, even as his voice frayed. “You’re not back there. Just breathe with me.”

But her breath rasped louder. Jagged. Erratic.

“Compliance will be rewarded.”

His rhythm slipped—lost inside her storm.

“I can’t—I can’t—” Her voice cracked. A sob tore out raw. It ripped at her throat.

Her hands slipped from her ears to her face, nails dragging sharp red lines down her cheeks. “It’s too much— stop it —”

The buzzing swelled—

“You are made of marble.”

List’s voice. Olivia’s singing. The scepter’s hum.

Tony’s footsteps, retreating into the stairwell.

She stumbled back—the table edge catching her hip.

“Let me go—”

Her knees buckled, but she caught herself—wild-eyed, panting, shaking. 

Romanoff’s jaw tightened—“Wendy, focus—” Her voice cracked through, but it didn’t land. 

“Are you ready to comply?”

She stepped closer, too close—Wendy flinched hard, a sharp “No!”  

Barton reached out—“Kid, hey—”—but pulled back, hands hovering. They were losing her.

The elevator dinged.

Wendy jumped—her breath shortened to gasps, her eyes darting to the sound. The doors slid open, and the Captain stepped in—sans jacket. His shoulders were loose, his face calm and still, like the air before a storm breaks. He scanned the room—shards on the floor, Romanoff tense, Barton crouched behind her with stiff muscles, Wendy unraveling. His eyes locked on her, steady, taking it in.

Romanoff’s head tilted—just a flicker—her eyes met his, sharp but frayed, a threadbare hold on control. Steve’s gaze lingered on her, then slid to Barton, his hands still out, empty. She exhaled, short—shifted her weight, a signal: Go.

Steve moved slowly, his boots silent, closing the gap. He sank a little—knees bending, shoulders dipping—not big, not loud. His frame was intimidating to most grown adults in their right mind, let alone a panicking child. 

“Wendy,” he said, soft as a breath.  “Hey. It’s me. It’s Steve.” 

His hands stayed low, open—watching her shake, her gasps slicing the air thin. “You don’t have to talk.”

Her head jerked— no, no, no —panic flaring, tears spilling over. She tried—“I-I—”—but it died, a rasp caught in her throat. Her hands clawed at her jeans, rocking faster—forward, back—too much, too fast. The buzzing screamed— “Maria Stark” —needles, whispers, Tony’s chair scraping, metal sliding against metal—louder, sharper.

The Captain edged closer. He moved slowly, without sharp movements. His hand reached out—gentle, warm—fingers brushing her forearm, light as a promise.

Romanoff’s breath hitched—slight, sharp—her hands twitched, but she held still, green eyes locked on.

The floor dropped.

Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was just the air, shifting—tightening around her like a vice.

Wendy’s world snapped.

A jolt—hot, sharp—shot up her arm, like touching a live wire. 

Then it broke open.

Her chest burned, too full—her heart slammed hard, too loud—her skin stretched tight, buzzing alive. 

Every one of her senses screamed out. The sounds she thought were overwhelming before deafened her now.

The lights stabbed her irises—everything was too much, too real . 

Her body felt different. Unrecognizable. 

Her right hand reached for purchase, clamped down, and heard a pained grunt. Something gave way under her grip, a sick snap she felt more than heard. She swung her left hand out and hit the table. Wood cracked loudly, splintering under her fingers. She hadn’t meant to—hadn’t felt it coming.

She yanked back. “What…” Her voice came out thin, breaking, her arm trembling, free of the Captain’s touch, but the fire stayed. 

Her legs wobbled. She stumbled upright, catching the table’s edge, her eyes darting, wild. “What’s happening?” Her breath raced, too fast, too big, not hers anymore. The buzzing roared, whispers gone, leaving only heat, only more .

She turned, hands shaking as she scrambled to steady herself, but the force in her body didn’t respond the way it used to. She wasn’t just moving anymore. She was pushing —everything was too fast, too strong. She felt the weight of the room shift. It wasn’t the floor beneath her; it was her—the way her legs coiled, like a spring, ready to explode. Her lungs burned, but it didn’t matter. She could breathe deeper, fuller, and faster than ever before.

And her senses —her eyes could take in the room in an instant, like every corner was a picture in focus all at once. She could smell everything—the faintest hint of blood, sweat, skin. The subtle scent of Tony’s cologne still lingering on the chair, Romanoff’s perfume, even the slight undercurrent of nerves coming off Barton.

Her body felt alive. Unstoppable.

Her right arm swung outward instinctively, but she didn’t see the table leg she clipped. It snapped in half like paper under her touch, flying across the room with a force she didn’t know she had.

“Wendy,” the Captain’s voice cut through the chaos—a calm beacon in a storm she couldn’t control. She whipped her head toward him, but the room was too loud, too hot—everything was too much. She wanted to say something—apologize? Warn him? She didn’t know.

She could feel the muscles in her arms straining, pulsing with power, and that buzzing—it was too much. She wasn’t just here anymore. She was everywhere, in every single vibration of the air, every beat of her own heart. Her nerves were stretched too tight—her senses on a razor’s edge.

She lashed out—just to feel something solid. She could feel it in her body, the movement before it even happened. She kicked—her foot slamming into the chair, flipping it across the room with no effort. The chair exploded against the glass wall, the force of the impact shaking the room. The sharp sound of shattering glass echoed as it rained down. But it was nothing compared to what she felt.

The Captain didn’t move—he didn’t flinch when the chair hit the wall. His eyes stayed locked on her, patient, waiting, still.

“Wendy.” His voice was like a hand pulling her back from the edge, even as everything inside of her screamed to go—to move faster, to fight harder. His eyes—his focus—grounded her, even through the storm inside her mind.

Her fingers—her hands—trembled as they flexed and unflexed, her nails digging into her palm. What was she doing?

“What… what’s happening to me?” she whispered again, the words coming out jagged, strained.

The Captain— Steve —didn’t answer right away. He took a step forward, his hands still low and open. “You’re okay,” he said, the words wrapped in calm certainty, even as everything inside her wanted to scream, to tear through everything. “I need you to breathe, okay? It’s overwhelming, I know. But you’re safe.”

But the truth was—she couldn’t feel anything except everything . Her skin burned, every nerve firing at once, her muscles alive, her senses stretched like rubber bands about to snap. She wasn’t breathing properly, not like she was supposed to. She couldn’t focus.

Her legs buckled under the weight of it all. She dropped to her knees, but her strength didn’t fade. It just kept rushing through her body, overwhelming, crashing over her.

“Wendy—” Steve started, but the sound was muffled, drowned by the ringing in her ears. Her head felt heavy, her heartbeat pulsing against her temples.

What was she even doing anymore?

She could barely see straight, but she saw Steve’s figure blur as he stepped closer. She jerked backward instinctively, afraid to touch him again, afraid of what would happen if she did.

“I can’t—I don’t know how to stop—” Her voice cracked, a sob breaking free from her throat.

It was too much. The power. The sensation. The speed.

But somehow, in that chaos, she reached for him.

Her hand brushed his wrist, tentative, just a brush, barely a whisper of contact—but it was enough.

A flood of clarity. For a brief, frantic moment, she knew exactly what he was going to do before he did it. She felt it in her bones. She was in sync with him. She could see his every motion before it unfolded. It was like being inside him.

It was like everything inside her had synced with his every motion, a connection so deep and raw it took her breath away. But it was too much—too overwhelming—more than she could ever comprehend.

Her hands dropped from his skin, trembling violently, and she staggered back, her mind racing to process what had just happened.

“Steve—” she gasped, stumbling backward, as the world around her began to spin once more.

Her vision blurred, the world around her spinning, everything too loud, too fast. The edges of reality felt jagged, like she was trying to hold onto something slipping through her fingers. The heightened clarity, the strength, the raw awareness—all of it was fading, retreating in a rush. The power ebbed away as swiftly as it had come, leaving behind only the echo of something greater, a sensation she couldn't quite grasp.

She crashed back into herself.

Breathing came harder, her senses muddy and blurred again. But she was still here. Still alive. Still... her.

Romanoff and Barton moved in immediately, but Steve stayed still—his eyes never leaving her, steady and calm.

“Wendy,” Steve said again, softer this time. “You’re okay. You’ve got this.”

Her chest still heaved, and her legs wobbled beneath her. She swayed slightly, her hand gripping the table for balance, relishing when it didn’t break beneath her grasp. It felt like a lifetime had passed in the span of those moments, like her body was still catching up to the reality of what had just happened. But slowly, steadily, her breath began to even out. The world around her, once sharp and overwhelming, was dulling again, slipping back into its familiar, quieter chaos.

She swallowed hard, blinking rapidly, trying to clear the fuzziness that clung to her vision.

“I... I don’t know what just happened,” she whispered, her voice strained. The panic was subsiding, leaving only the raw ache of confusion. Her fingers trembled as she pressed them to her forehead, trying to ground herself in something—anything.

Steve took a careful step closer, his presence solid and reassuring. He didn’t touch her again; he just stood there, letting the quiet settle between them.

“You back with us?” he asked quietly. 

Barton— Clint —was still crouched nearby, his eyes scanning her, the tension in his posture slowly easing. Romanoff—Natasha—held her distance, but her gaze was soft, no longer harried. The storm in the room had passed—for now.

Wendy’s hands dropped from her face, her fingers lightly brushing against her jumper as if trying to reassure herself she was still in control. Her voice came out almost like a whisper, raw, tentative. “What did I just... do?”

Steve flexed his hand, smothering a wince. Wendy watched the swelling skin around his forearm move with his fingers. Her face fell.

“Was that me?”

Steve froze mid-flex, his eyes snapping to hers—steady, but a shadow crossed them. “Yes,” he said, voice low, careful. “You got me good.” He forced a small grin, tight at the edges, and shook his hand out like it was a minor sting. “It’s fine. I’ve had worse.” He kept his tone light, but his other hand hovered near his wrist, guarding it.

“I didn’t… I didn’t mean to,” her voice cracked, small and shaky, her hands curling into her jumper. Wendy’s breath hitched, her eyes glued to the red, puffy skin—her fault. “I’m sorry.” Her chest tightened, guilt flooding in, hot and heavy.

Clint shifted, rising slowly around Natasha. 

“Hey, kid, easy.” 

He kept his hands low, palms out—a little stiff, like he wasn’t sure where to put them. “You didn’t do it on purpose. Right?” His voice was gruff, trying for calm, but his eyes flicked to the wrecked chair, the splintered table—wary, quick. “Just… take it slow now, okay?”

Natasha stepped forward, her movements deliberate, stopping a few feet back. “You’re alright,” she said, firm but quiet, her gaze locked on Wendy. “Whatever that was, it’s done. Breathe.” She exhaled slowly, a cue, her hands staying loose yet tense at her sides—like she was ready to move if whatever it was flared again.

Wendy nodded, jerky, her throat burning. “I don’t… I don’t know how it happened.” Her hands trembled, brushing her jumper again—clinging to the wool like it’d hold her together. “It was so fast. I couldn’t—” She swallowed hard, eyes darting to Steve’s wrist, then away. 

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered again, barely audible.

Steve crouched all the way down, keeping a careful gap between them. “Hey, look at me.” His voice was gentle, but it carried weight, pulling her focus. “You don’t need to be sorry. You didn’t mean it—I know that.” He held her gaze, calm but guarded, his swollen wrist resting on his knee. “Just stay with us, alright? Deep breaths.”

Clint nodded, his hands dropping to his thighs—still watching her closely. “You’re good now, kid. Let’s keep it that way.” He forced a half-smile, rough around the edges, but his stance stayed wide—braced, like he wasn’t sure she’d stay still.

Natasha’s jaw ticked, her eyes narrowing slightly—not at Wendy, just thinking. 

“You’re here,” she said, voice low, steady. “That’s what counts. Focus on that.” She didn’t move closer, her boots planted firm, her fingers twitching once before stilling—alert, cautious. “We’ll sort it out. Just… stay calm.”

“I didn’t want…” Her voice faltered, raw and small, trailing off as her eyes flicked to the wreckage again—sharp wood, broken ceramic, shattered glass, Steve’s wrist. Wendy’s fingers dug into her jumper, twisting tight. Her breath shuddered, catching in her chest. “I didn’t mean any of it.” She pressed her palms to her face, hiding, her shoulders hunching small.

Steve stayed low, his voice softening but firm. “We know,” he said, simple, steady. “You’re alright now. Just keep breathing—nice and slow.” He didn’t move, didn’t push—his eyes stayed on her, watchful, his swollen hand still but visible, a quiet reminder.

Clint rubbed his neck, glancing at Natasha, then back to Wendy. 

“You’ll be okay,” he said, gruff but gentle. “We’ve got you.” His half-smile flickered again, but his feet didn’t shift—still braced, still waiting.

Natasha exhaled through her nose, her gaze sliding to the open stairwell door—where Tony had gone, where the silence stretched. 

“Sit,” she said, voice flat but not harsh, nodding to one of the chairs still intact. “Rest. We’ll handle it.” Her hands stayed at her sides, tense, her eyes flicking between Wendy and Steve—sharp and measured, holding the room together.

Wendy nodded again, slower this time, her hands dropping limp to her lap. She shuffled to the chair, her legs shaky, and sank into it—careful, like it might break too. Her breath hitched once, then leveled, shallow but steady. 

The room hummed, dull and heavy, the air thick. Her fingers brushed her jumper again as her eyes stayed low, fixed on nothing.

She couldn’t look them in the eye. Not after whatever that was.

Steve rose slowly, flexing his hand once more—wincing—and stepping back, giving her space. Clint shifted his weight, arms crossed loosely over his chest. Natasha stayed where she was, a sentinel, her silence louder than the wreckage around them.

The stairwell door hung open, quiet.

Chapter Text

There were versions of Tony Stark the world would never see. 

Pepper Potts had spent most of her career making sure of it.

By 9:08 AM, she was already two emails deep into a merger renegotiation, one phone call scheduled with Seoul, and halfway through a black coffee when JARVIS quietly redirected her attention to the residential floors. No sirens. No crash reports. Just a location ping and a timestamp—Tony was in the lab early, and “experiencing elevated stress”.

She didn’t hesitate to swing her blazer over her arm and march straight to the elevator, heels like metronome ticks. She was controlled and composed.

Miss Yokota stopped her in her pursuit of the elevator to check in, to assure everything was alright.

“Everything is fine,” Pepper said, a thin smile crossing her face. “If you could push my 9:30 call to my lunch hour? If that won’t work for them, reschedule it for next week.”

“Of course, Miss Potts!” Miss Yokota confirmed. As always, a cheery grin spread from ear to ear.

She walked into the lab like she’d walked into every crisis in his life: sharp-eyed, steady, already calculating. Damage assessment came second nature. And Tony Stark—brilliant, infuriating, impossible Tony—was slouched in a chair like gravity had turned personal.

The world would never see this version.

But she was privileged.

And she never got used to it.

The lab smelled like metal and stale coffee, the overhead lights too bright against the clutter—tools scattered, a half-built gauntlet tipped over on the bench, gray wraps stark around Tony’s hands. 

She clocked it all in a blink: the blood crusted at his knuckles, the slump of his shoulders, the way his head tipped back like he was daring the ceiling to argue. Steve stood off to the side, arms crossed, boots stepping quietly as he handed her the reins with a nod. She filed that too—Steve’s steady exit, the unspoken take care of him. The elevator doors hissed shut behind him, and the hum of the lab swallowed the silence.

Pepper stepped into the lab, her shoes clicking softly against the floor, but it wasn’t the sound that caught Tony’s attention. It was the way she moved—careful, deliberate. She knew exactly how to approach him when he was like this. The clutter in the lab—the unfinished projects, the disarray—had become background noise.

Her eyes immediately tracked to his hands. The gray wraps around his hands were too tight, no doubt, digging into the skin. Steve had meant well, she was sure of it, but the efficiency combined with the material he used wouldn’t work in the long term. Maybe for a soldier.

Not for Tony.

The sharpness of Tony’s skin when it was irritated, the way his fingers twitched in response to pressure… Pepper knew that irritation all too well. She wondered how long he'd been ignoring it. Not long enough to risk infection, but long enough to make him feel more confined, more brittle.

She stopped a few steps away, close enough for him to hear her, but far enough to give him space.

“Tony,” she said, her tone a little more tender than usual, but still clear. He didn’t look up immediately, but she saw his head tilt slightly, like he knew exactly what she was referring to.

“You’re gonna make that worse," she added, glancing at the wraps, then back at his face. He didn’t need to hear it, but he would—eventually. He always did.

Tony grunted, his eyes staying shut, like he didn’t want to let anyone in, least of all her. But she was already moving. She didn’t ask. She just did it.

Reaching out, she gently took his hand in hers, feeling the stiff tension of the wraps digging into his skin. Her thumb brushed over the pressure point near his wrist, and he finally looked up, his expression drawn tight. She held his gaze for a second before speaking again, her voice neutral, not demanding.

“Let me fix it,” she said. She didn’t wait for an answer.

Her fingers worked quickly, slipping under the edge of the wrap, peeling it back where it bit too hard. The skin underneath was red, raw in spots, and she pressed her lips thin but didn’t say a word. She reached for the med kit on the bench—always there, always stocked—and popped it open with one hand, pulling out a roll of softer gauze. Tony’s hand stayed limp in hers, twitching once, but he didn’t pull away.

“Steve’s a soldier,” she said, voice dry as she unwound the last of the gray mess. “And good at first aid on the fly, it seems. But we can do better.” She tossed the old wraps aside, letting them hit the floor with a soft thud, and started rewrapping—loose enough to breathe, tight enough to hold. Her movements were practiced, steady—years of patching him up, from paper cuts to shrapnel scars.

Tony’s eyes followed her hands, red-rimmed and hollow. “Should’ve seen the other guy,” he muttered, voice rough, scraping past his throat. His smirk flickered, thin and half-dead, but his fingers flexed under her touch—testing, not fighting.

“Yeah, I bet,” she said, not looking up, her tone flat but warm at the edges. She secured the gauze, smoothing it down with her thumb, and let his hand fall gently back to his lap. “Better?”

He flexed it, slowly, staring at the new wrap like it might talk back. “Peachy,” he rasped, then leaned back harder, head tipping again. “You’re wasting your talents down here, Potts. Should’ve been a field medic.”

She stood, brushing her hands on her skirt, and grabbed a water bottle from the bench, cracking it open and setting it in front of him without a word. 

“Drink,” she said, firm, then stepped back, leaning against the workbench, arms crossed. Her eyes stayed on him—sharp, steady—watching the way his shoulders slumped deeper, the way his breath hitched just once before settling.

He didn’t touch the water. His hand hovered near it, then fell back. “Not thirsty,” he said, voice low, almost lost in the lab’s hum. His gaze drifted past her, to the gauntlet, the tools, the nothing—and his jaw ticked, tight.

Pepper didn’t push. Not yet. She shifted her weight, heels clicking once, and picked up a screwdriver, twirling it between her fingers, giving her hands something to do. 

“You’re not bleeding anymore,” she said, matter-of-fact. “That’s a start.”  Her eyes flicked to his knuckles—crusted, not fresh—then back to his face. Her voice softened, just enough to show she cared, but firm enough to remind him she wasn’t letting him off the hook. “What happened?”

Tony let out a small breath, but the answer didn’t come immediately. His gaze didn’t meet hers, flicking between the tools on the bench and the scattered blueprints still half-buried in a mess of equations. His fingers twitched again, restless against the benchtop.

Pepper’s eyes never left him, but she didn’t rush. He’d get there when he was ready—or when he realized he wasn’t going to have a choice.

She shifted again, placing the screwdriver back on the bench, her hand hovering over it for a beat longer than necessary before stepping closer. Her voice was steady, almost casual as she said, “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me.”

He was quiet for too long. That was always the tell. Tony could talk his way out of a war crime, given the chance—but silence? That was dangerous.

Still, she waited. Pressing too hard, too early, never worked. She gave him the space, gave him her presence instead, constant and quiet. Arms crossed. Weight evenly balanced. Nothing in her posture said panic—it said I’m here, and she knew he’d recognize it.

He shifted. Just enough to notice. Jaw tight.

“I’m not going to…” he started, then stopped, voice trailing off into the static of the lab’s hum.

Pepper didn’t move.

His shoulders rose like he might try again. But instead, his eyes flicked toward her once, then away—and he exhaled like it hurt.

“You ever feel stuck, Pep?” he asked, voice low and frayed.

The words themselves didn’t catch her off guard—she’d known him too long for that—but the fact that he’d asked did. Tony Stark didn’t often peel back the layers, not like this, not without a quip or a deflection. It was a crack in the armor, and she felt the weight of it settle over her.

She let the silence stretch between them, not out of hesitation, but because a question like that deserved more than a knee-jerk response. Her mind churned, pulling her back to the last five hours—her first hours back in this building, back in his orbit, after weeks apart. She hadn’t seen him since before Christmas, since the Extremis had been burned out of her system and she’d needed space to recalibrate, to reclaim herself. Those weeks had been a blur of virtual board meetings, strategic pivots, and quiet nights wrestling with her own ghosts.

“All the time,” she said simply.

It was the truth, unvarnished. She’d felt stuck plenty—trapped between the chaos of Stark Industries and the chaos of Tony, between her own ambitions and the life she’d chosen beside him. That earned her a flicker of acknowledgment from him, a small nod or something close to it, and she saw the tension in his shoulders shift, just slightly.

Pepper resisted the urge to reach out, to rest a hand on his arm or his shoulder. She wanted to—God, she wanted to—but she knew him well enough to see he wasn’t there yet. He was still raw, still processing, and touch would only push him further into himself. Instead, she moved with purpose, her fingers brushing the bottle on the table as she nudged it closer to him. No pressure, just proximity. A quiet offer. She was a businesswoman, after all—a CEO who thrived on solutions, on reading the room and knowing what was needed without being told. This was her language: practical, deliberate, grounded.

Tony’s fingers twitched again, then stilled, and she watched the movement with the precision of someone who’d spent years cataloging his tells. 

“I’m not—” he started, then stopped, shaking his head as if the words wouldn’t line up right. He rubbed a hand across his mouth, a gesture she’d seen a thousand times when he was fraying at the seams. “I just need to get this right,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, fragile in a way that made her chest ache.

She remembered the call yesterday, his voice breaking over the line as he told her about the girl—his sudden, impossible daughter. 

Fifteen years old, a life marked by trauma, and Tony, in his infinite, reckless heart, had decided she was his to save. 

“I know you want to do right by her,” she’d told him then, her tone firm but laced with care. “I do. And I will always admire that about you, that you care so deeply about people, but you need to look at the big picture right now. You’re not exactly in a good position to take in a teenager.” 

She’d been blunt because she had to be—because she’d seen the panic attacks, the nightmares, the way he’d buried himself in his suits until he couldn’t tell day from night. He could barely tie his shoes without her some days, let alone shoulder this on his own.

But Tony had been adamant, his conviction unshakable, and she’d backed him because that’s what they did—they held each other up, even when the ground was crumbling. 

Now, standing here, she saw the toll it was taking. The cracks were deeper than she’d feared: the tremble in his hands, the hollow edge to his words. She’d been right to worry, but she also knew he was more than the sum of his fractures. 

Tony Stark was brilliant, relentless, capable of moving mountains when he believed in something. And he believed in this.

Pepper took a deep breath, her mind already shifting gears. She was a problem-solver, a strategist. They’d need to set up a space for the girl—clothes, school, stability. They’d need to talk to her, to understand her story, her needs. Patience would be key; adjustment wouldn’t happen overnight. 

But above all, Tony would need her. He was teetering on the edge, trying to be everything for everyone, and she couldn’t let him fall. She wouldn’t.

Pepper had allowed him to fall alone before. She wouldn’t do that again. 

Her gaze softened as she looked at him, her heart twisting at the effort he was pouring into holding it together. She wanted to tell him it would be okay, to wrap him up and take the weight for a moment. But he didn’t need platitudes or coddling—he needed her strength, her presence. So she stayed where she was, posture steady, arms still crossed, projecting the quiet certainty she’d honed over years at the helm of a Fortune 500 empire, even if most of those years had been by proxy of the man before her. 

She was here. She wasn’t going anywhere. That was the message she willed him to feel.

Tony’s fingers hovered over a half-assembled gauntlet, then curled into a fist. He exhaled—a sharp, jagged sound—and turned his head just enough for her to catch the strain in his profile. 

“The crash that killed my parents,” he said, voice low, almost swallowed by the hum of the room. “It wasn’t an accident. Howard wasn’t drunk. HYDRA took them out.”

Pepper’s pulse spiked, but she kept her stance steady, arms crossed loosely at her chest. The official story—Howard’s reckless drinking, the slick December roads, the tree—had been gospel for decades, from longer than she had known him. Tony had carried it like a scar. 

She tilted her head, voice calm but deliberate. “HYDRA? You’re sure?”

His nod was tight, clipped. “Wendy confirmed it. Said it like it was just another detail, another .” He turned fully now, eyes dark and burning. “They planned it. Clean hit. Made it look like Dad’s fault. They fed me a lie and I swallowed it whole.”

Pepper’s mind churned, sorting the pieces. In all fairness, she was still struggling to wrap her head around the idea of HYDRA even existing in this day and age. The world was far from a perfect place. America, like every country, has its flaws and seedy history. But for a Nazi organization such as HYDRA to have survived seventy years in the shadows… 

What could ever be identified as American ingenuity when the knowledge that, somewhere behind the curtain, Nazis were still pulling the strings? 

Not only that, but Tony’s decades of anger and blame toward his father were now reframed as a lie. She’d seen him wrestle with Howard’s shadow—anger, grief, resentment—but this was a violation, a theft. 

She took a slow step forward, heels clicking faintly. “Obviously, they’re good at covering tracks,” she said, pragmatic, measured. “You were what—twenty-one? You were mourning. No one could’ve seen through that.”

Tony’s mouth twisted, a bitter half-smile. “But I should have.” His hand scrubbed over his face, lingering at his jaw. “All those years, blaming my dad. And he was just as much a victim.”

Her chest tightened—she knew that guilt, the way it gnawed at him. She’d watched it flare after every close call, every near-miss. But this wasn’t his to carry. 

“They didn’t just fool you,” she asserted, voice firm, cutting through his spiral. “They fooled everyone. The police, the press, SI. This was their game, Tony—not your failure.”

He met her eyes for a beat, then looked away, his breath uneven. His fingers flexed, then stilled. “There’s more,” he muttered. “Stane. I think he set it up.”

Pepper’s breath caught, sharp and cold. Obadiah Stane—his name was a ghost she’d buried deep. She saw him in flashes: his broad hand clapping Tony’s shoulder, his oily smile as he’d leaned too close— “You’re a rare woman, Pepper” —and the ice in the unseeing eyes of his mask when he’d tried to kill her. Her stomach turned, but she locked it down, keeping her face neutral. “Obadiah?” she asked, voice steady, inviting him to go on.

Tony’s gaze hardened, a flicker of rage breaking through. “He was there—every step. The funeral, the board meetings. Pushed me into the CEO chair, kept me distracted.” His voice dropped, rough with venom. “He knew Howard’s moves, Pep. HYDRA needed an inside man; it was him. I’d bet my life he signed off on it.”

Anger surged in her, hot and sudden, threading through the old fear. She remembered Obie’s betrayal—how he’d ripped the arc reactor out of Tony’s chest, how he’d chased after her in a clunking suit of war, how she’d barely escaped that night. 

If he’d orchestrated the crash too… 

She exhaled slowly, filing the fury away. “He’s gone,” she said, low and controlled. “You took him down. Whatever he did, he doesn’t get to touch you anymore.”

Tony’s laugh was hollow, edged with pain. “Doesn’t he? He took them, Pep. My parents. And I—” He stopped, his throat working, eyes glistening. He pressed a fist to his chest, voice dropping to a whisper. “I’m so angry, it’s tearing me apart. But Wendy… she can’t see this. Not this side of me. Not ever.”

She stepped closer, crouching slightly to meet his downcast gaze. “She won’t,” she said, voice quiet but certain. “You’re not going to let her. You’ve got this under control—more than you think.”

He shook his head, faint, defeated. “Doesn’t feel like it. Feels like I’m breaking.”

Her hands settled on his arms, light but steady, grounding him. “You’re not,” she said, pragmatic, unwavering. “You’re feeling it—all of it—and you’re still here. That’s strength, Tony. Wendy doesn’t need to see the anger because you’ll show her what comes next.” She squeezed gently, holding his eyes. “You’re not alone in this. I’ve got you.”

Tony’s breath hitched, and his hand covered hers, trembling but firm. His head dipped, voice barely audible. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, soft but sure. “One step at a time. We’ll figure it out.”

He didn’t speak, but his grip tightened—a lifeline in the quiet. His forehead fell forward to meet her collarbone, and she stepped into his space. Her cheek rested against the back of his head.

“Sir,” JARVIS said, his tone sharp, clipped. “There’s been an incident upstairs. I’m registering... significant damage.”

Pepper straightened at once. Her grip slipped from Tony’s, but her presence didn’t.

Tony’s head snapped up, his eyes narrowing as JARVIS’s words cut through the fragile quiet. 

“Damage?” he questioned, his voice was sharp, rough-edged, slicing past the haze of grief. “What are we talking—structural? Casualties? Give me something, JARVIS.”

“There has been significant… redecoration to the 93rd floor, sir,” JARVIS replied, his tone crisp and measured. “Captain Rogers is managing the situation, but your presence would be appreciated.”

Tony shoved off the stool, the legs scraping harshly against the lab floor. His hands trembled as he gripped the edge of the workbench for a split second, steadying himself.

 “Wendy’s up there,” he said, the words tumbling out fast, laced with a fear he couldn’t mask. “If she’s hurt—if something happened—”

Pepper’s hand found his arm, her touch firm but gentle, anchoring him before he could spiral further.

“Tony, hold on,” she said, her voice calm but insistent, cutting through his rising panic. “We don’t know what’s happened yet. Let’s not assume the worst.”

He turned to her, his expression a raw mix of dread and resolve, the earlier vulnerability still clinging to him like a damp cloth. 

“I can’t lose her, Pep. Not after—” His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard, jaw tight. “I need to be there.”

“We will be,” she said, her tone steady, unwavering. “Together. But you’re not charging in blind, in a panic.” She squeezed his arm lightly, her eyes locking with his—pragmatic, reassuring. “We’ll figure this out. Step by step.”

Tony exhaled, a jagged breath that seemed to pull him back from the edge. He nodded once, curt and decisive. “Right. Smart.”

Pepper stepped back, grabbing her blazer from where she’d draped it over the workbench and slipping it on with a practiced flick. Her heels clicked sharply as she matched his stride toward the elevator, her mind already racing—Wendy, the damage, the rest of her work schedule that will likely need to be thrown out a window, assuming one of the windows on the 93rd floor was included in the so-called “redecoration”. She kept her posture composed, but her pulse thudded with the same urgency she saw in Tony’s tense shoulders.

JARVIS had the elevator open and ready for them as they walked up. “JARVIS, keep me posted,” he snapped. “Anything changes, I want to know yesterday.”

“Of course, sir,” JARVIS replied smoothly.

Pepper wisely did not comment that they were only two floors below.

The doors slid open, and they stepped inside. Tony’s hand brushed against Pepper’s, his fingers curling around hers for a fleeting moment—a silent tether as the elevator began its ascent. She returned the grip, her thumb brushing his knuckles, grounding him as the hum of the lab faded behind them.

The elevator climbed, carrying them from the controlled chaos of Tony’s sanctuary to the uncertain mess awaiting upstairs. The air between them hung heavy, charged with the lingering weight of his confession and the unspoken promise in her presence. As the doors parted, the lab’s steady hum was replaced by a suffocating quiet. 

Pepper stepped out of the elevator behind Tony, her heels clicking against the floor, though the sound barely registered amidst the heavy tension in the room. Her gaze swept across the scene, sharp and methodical, taking in every detail of the chaos before her.

To her right, a chair had impacted the glass wall separating the main room from the server banks. It wasn’t just resting against the glass—it was embedded, its legs twisted and splintered, surrounded by a scattering of shards that glittered on the floor. The force required to do that was significant, far beyond a casual shove, and Pepper’s mind flagged it as a sign of something violent and uncontrolled.

The central meeting table drew her attention next. One of its legs was completely shattered, reduced to jagged splinters, while a distinct crack ran along the edge of the tabletop. The damage there was peculiar—almost as if someone had gripped it with extraordinary strength. She didn’t know what—or who—had caused it yet, but the oddity of it lingered in her thoughts, a puzzle piece she’d need to revisit.

On the floor near the table, a broken mug lay in pieces, its spilled liquid pooling darkly across the tiles. It was a minor detail compared to the rest, but it added to the picture of sudden, chaotic disruption.

Steve stood near the table, his posture rigid, one hand cradling his wrist at an unnatural angle. The swelling beneath his skin confirmed Pepper’s immediate suspicion: it was likely broken. For someone like Steve, enhanced and resilient, that kind of injury spoke volumes about the force involved. Her concern deepened, not just for him, but for whatever could have done this.

Clint and Natasha flanked the table, their stances betraying a readiness that set Pepper on edge. Clint’s arms were crossed tightly, his jaw set, while Natasha’s wide stance and alert posture suggested she was prepared to act at a moment’s notice. These were seasoned Avengers, not easily rattled, and their tension told her this was no ordinary incident.

In the chair between Natasha and Clint, Wendy sat folded into a ball, her knees drawn up to her chest, her face half-hidden behind her arms. She looked small, fragile even, a stark contrast to the wreckage around her. Her posture suggested fear or shame, maybe both, and Pepper’s heart tightened at the sight. Whatever had happened here, Wendy was at the center of it—and not as a defiant instigator, but as someone overwhelmed.

She glanced at Tony, who had frozen beside her, his eyes locked on Wendy. His jaw was tight, his hands clenched at his sides, but she could see the tremor in his fingers.

Pepper stepped forward, her voice calm but firm, cutting through the silence. “Steve, what happened?”

Steve’s eyes met hers, his expression controlled but strained. “We’re not sure,” he said, his voice steady despite the pain in his wrist. “Something triggered her strength, senses, everything. It was like… like she mirrored me, but it was too much. She didn’t know how to handle it.”

Pepper’s brow furrowed slightly, but she kept her composure. “Mirrored you?” she asked, her tone measured, though her mind was already racing.

Steve nodded, flexing his injured wrist with a wince. “It started when I touched her. She… absorbed it, somehow. My abilities. But it overwhelmed her. She didn’t mean to—” He gestured vaguely to the room, the wreckage speaking for itself.

Natasha stepped in, her voice low and precise. “We don’t know the full extent yet. But it’s clear she’s enhanced, and it could be tied to contact.” Her gaze flicked to Wendy, who hadn’t moved, still curled tightly in the chair. “She’s stable now, but we need to be careful.”

Pepper’s eyes followed Natasha’s to Wendy, taking in the girl’s small, trembling form. Enhanced. The word settled heavily in her mind, another layer to the already complicated situation.

“Is she hurt?” Tony, still rooted to the spot, finally spoke, his voice rough but controlled. His eyes hadn’t left Wendy, his concern palpable despite the tension in his stance.

Clint shook his head, his arms still crossed, though his posture had eased slightly. “No. She’s shaken, but physically, she’s fine. It’s the room that took the hit.” He glanced at the splintered table, then back at Tony. “And Steve’s wrist.”

Tony’s jaw clenched harder, his gaze darting to Steve’s injury. “You’re sure she’s okay?” he asked again, his voice quieter this time, almost pleading.

Steve gave a small nod. “She’s fine, Tony. Just… scared. Confused.” He flexed his wrist again, wincing but managing a faint smile. “I’ll heal. Don’t worry about me.”

Pepper’s eyes darted between the girl in the chair and her partner beside her. Wendy looked even younger, tied into a knot with her face hidden in her knees. And Tony—he looked wrecked. She didn’t discount the revelation of HYDRA’s involvement in his parents’ death as a contributing factor, but something in her gut said this is it. This is what makes this possible.

Her hand landed on his elbow, drawing his attention. “She needs you,” she murmured, almost a whisper. “She’s scared and she needs you .”

Convincing Tony Stark to do something had never been necessary. One of her favourite versions of the man was the one who would do anything within his power to ensure the health and safety of those he cares about. He’d pack everything down into a box to unpack at a different, likely inconvenient time, because nothing would be more important to him than the very select few he considered his family. For the last two years, that had only consisted of her and Rhodey, maybe Happy. The little girl, who shared his dark hair and nose, was now included in that.

So when Tony shoved his way past Natasha Romanoff, who wisely stepped out of his path, she wasn’t surprised. She watched the man kneel down in front of the chair, hands floating hesitantly before landing one on the girl’s arm, wrapped tightly around her legs.

Wendy flinched, and so did he.

“Wendy,” he hummed in a whisper. “Can you look at me? Please?”

It was a long bated breath before the girl raised her head just enough to make eye contact with the genius. His face softened around his eyes. 

“You’re safe,” he said. “No one is mad at you. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Her head raised more. “But… I shouldn’t have said it like that. I ruined it. I hurt the Captain —”

From her place above the three-stair descent to the meeting table, she could see the redness around the girl’s brilliantly blue eyes. A tear fell down her cheek.

“You shouldn’t even be touching me! I don’t know how I did it, or if I can control it! I can hurt you —”

“So can we,” Tony interrupted. Pepper’s eyes widened. That was not what she had expected or hoped he would say. 

It seemed that Pepper wasn’t the only one caught off-guard, based on Natasha’s hissed “Tony…”

“Really,” he continued. He never broke eye contact with her. “What’s the difference between you coming in here and trusting us not to hurt you? That we can control our abilities? Because we’re the good guys? Because I hate to ruin our image, but no one here is perfect. And while I’m not a mind reader, I think I speak for all of us that we are very afraid of hurting you.”

The girl’s arms around her knees loosened. “Why?”

Tony’s face distorted into a grim smile. “Because you’ve been through enough. Because even though you’ve proven yourself to be very strong,”—Tony glanced at the Captain—“in more ways than one, you placing your trust in us gives us a helluva lot of power over you. It makes you vulnerable. Very easy to hurt.”

Tony’s other hand came up, palm open. Wendy slid her hand into his.

Trust.

“If we can be brave enough to do our very best not to hurt you, because you’ve placed that trust in us, can you be brave enough for us to trust you to do the same?”

Again, that feeling arose: this is it. This is what makes this possible.  

Tony’s heart was raw and bleeding, scarred and fortified, but she’d seen him wield it with a precision that could cut or create. That same instinct—the one that drove him to build, to protect, to fix—would guide him through this. Wield it like a weapon, but use it like a pen. He’d make it work. He always did.

The text was sent before she even registered that her phone was in her hand.

PEPPER POTTS: Clear my schedule for the morning. I’ll be back after lunch. (09:39)

YUI YOKOTA: Yes, ma’am! Is there anything I can do that would help you? (09:39)

PEPPER POTTS: No, thank you, Ms Yokota. Tony has it handled. (09:40)

Chapter Text

Natasha didn’t believe in fate, but she did believe in patterns.

Repetitive behavior. Shifts in tone. Variations in rhythm. The things people said when they thought no one was listening. The things they didn’t say when someone was. Pattern recognition wasn’t a skill for her—it was instinct, honed by necessity. If she hadn’t developed it, she wouldn’t have survived the Red Room.

The Red Room didn’t raise girls; it forged weapons. Cold rooms, colder voices. Instructors with clipped accents barking orders—faster, stronger, silent. She’d learned early to watch the others, to spot the tells. A twitch in a girl’s hand before she struck. A hitch in her breath before she broke. Natasha cataloged every movement, every failure. Survival demanded it. She’d been twelve when she first saw a girl snap—Lena, blonde and wiry, who’d laughed too loud. One misstep in training, one crack in the mask, and they dragged her away. Natasha never saw her again. The lesson stuck: control or be controlled.

Defecting to S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn’t erased the instinct—it sharpened it. Fury’s orders replaced the Red Room’s, but the game was the same: read the room, find the leverage, stay alive.

Clint had been the first anomaly. He offered trust, rather than demanding it. She’d weighed it, tested it, and kept it close. There were definitely moments in which she pushed the boundary of that offered trust, yet he still remained in her corner. She never understood why.

S.H.I.E.L.D. gave her a name, a purpose, but the patterns stayed. Allies lied. Enemies smiled. The truth lived in the gaps.

One memory cut deeper, lodged like a splinter. The Red Room had wanted more than precision—they’d wanted power. A batch of “volunteers” pulled from the ranks, girls Natasha knew by sight, not name. Thin wrists, hollow eyes. They’d been dosed with something experimental—reflex enhancers, the handlers called it.

She’d watched from the sidelines, ordered to observe. The girls twitched, then thrashed, their bodies moving too fast, too severely. One shattered a steel table with a kick she couldn’t stop. Another clawed at her own arms, blood streaking the floor. They tried to tear their bodies apart. They didn’t last long. Screams turned to gasps, then silence. The handlers shot them before they could stabilize—three bullets, three bodies. Natasha had stood still, face blank, filing it away. Power without control results in neutralization.

There were three sides to every story: their side, her side, and the truth.

She stood in the wreckage of the 93rd floor, boots planted amid the glass and splinters. The air smelled of spilled tea and tension. Her eyes tracked the scene—the chair embedded in the server wall, the table leg snapped, a crack along the edge like someone had squeezed too hard. Steve cradled his wrist, swollen and wrong . Pepper’s heels clicked as she moved, voice steady, giving orders. Clint left in search of a first aid kit, finding one under the three-stair rise to the central walkway. Tony remained before Wendy, one hand on her arm, the other holding her hand, his voice low. The girl was a ball of knees and elbows, dark hair hiding her face.

Natasha’s stomach shifted, a heavy weight settling in. She’d seen this before. Not this room, not these people—but the shape of it. Strength unleashed, uncontained. A child caught in the fallout.

A pattern was beginning to present itself, and it made Natasha nervous.

She moved before she had time to second-guess it. Slipped into the space like smoke—quiet, unobtrusive, watching everything. Not interfering. Not yet.

Pepper had gotten Steve seated at the edge of the broken table. His arm was beginning to turn a dark purple, but his face didn’t so much as twitch. Clint crouched nearby, preparing a splint. The super-soldier serum would take care of the rest, so long as he had a big lunch.

That wasn’t what concerned Natasha.

It was the girl.

Wendy.

She was coiled in on herself, a perfect knot of tension and muscle, and the energy around her hadn’t settled. She wasn’t shaking, wasn’t speaking. She was too still. Too quiet.

Tony stayed close, one knee on the floor beside her, murmuring something too low for Natasha to catch. His hand never left hers.

He was breaking a pattern, though—or maybe forming a new one.

Wendy needed him, and he hadn’t run. He hadn’t panicked.

He’d stayed.

Natasha could take an educated guess on the way he likely spiraled after his abrupt exit not twenty minutes ago, but he hadn’t known—hadn’t seen —the state of the kid. 

She filed that away.

Natasha’s eyes swept the room again, cataloging impact points—how far the chair had flown, the force required to splinter finished oak. It wasn’t just adrenaline. Not just fear. This wasn’t a girl lashing out blindly.

This was someone whose body moved faster than her mind could follow.

Just like those girls in the Red Room. Except she was still here.

Still alive. Still her.

Natasha stepped closer. Not enough to draw attention—just enough to shift the angle. It was better to read Wendy’s face beneath the curtain of hair. She didn’t speak. The girl’s breathing was shallow, but slower than before. Her fingers were twitching.

Not with fear. With restraint.

Wendy was holding herself back.

Natasha's jaw tensed. It wasn't the volatility that worried her—it was the awareness. That flicker of control in someone who should by all rights be in shock. This wasn’t chaos. It was something worse.

It was discipline.

Another pattern. One Natasha had lived through and clawed her way out of. A pattern she would burn to the ground before it took root again.

She crouched beside Tony, a silent presence. He didn’t glance at her. Just gave the barest nod.

She kept her voice low.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

Tony didn’t answer, didn’t even look in her direction. It was Wendy who had just barely moved. Her hand tightened in his. Her shoulders trembled.

And then she said, in a voice so quiet Natasha had to lean in to hear it:

“I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

It wasn’t a confession.

It was a plea.

And Natasha’s stomach twisted because she recognized the shape of it, too. Not fear.

Guilt.

Surrender.

“I know,” Natasha said. “I believe you. But we need to know. Has this happened before?”

Wendy shook her head. “Not that I can remember.”

Natasha held her gaze for a beat, searching. Memory was a cracked mirror—it showed a distorted image. Tony said before that the girl had problems remembering things clearly. 

The girl’s eyes were wide, blue, too clear for lies. But not remembering didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Natasha knew that better than most. The Red Room had taken chunks of her own past, left holes she’d filled with guesses. Wendy’s “not that I can remember” was a gap, not a denial.

She straightened, measured and deliberate. Her eyes flicked to Tony—still silent, still fixed on the kid. His knuckles were white where he gripped her hand. Protective. Raw. Not the Stark who’d swaggered into S.H.I.E.L.D. with all the confidence of a man who built his own path. This one was unguarded, fragile in a way that didn’t fit the pattern she’d built of him.

However, this Stark seemed to be becoming increasingly more common. Maybe it wasn’t he who was breaking the blueprint, but the pattern that was the problem.

Natasha stepped back, boots silent on the glass-strewn floor. She turned her attention to Steve, still seated, still steady despite the purple spreading up his arm. Clint was wrapping the splint, muttering something about needing ice. Pepper stood nearby, arms crossed, watching Tony and Wendy with a look Natasha couldn’t quite place—soft, but sharp-edged.

“Steve,” Natasha said, voice flat, cutting through the quiet. “Walk me through it again.”

He glanced up, blue eyes meeting hers. No flinch, no grimace—just a trained calm. 

“She grabbed my arm,” he said, simple, like he was reciting a report. “Next thing I knew, she was as strong or stronger than me. I tried to hold her steady—it didn’t work.”

Natasha’s mind ticked over the words. Contact. Strength. Escalation. Like those girls—except Steve hadn’t shot her. Hadn’t let go, either, not even when she broke his arm. She filed that away, too.

“How long?” she asked.

“Ten seconds, maybe fifteen,” Steve said. “She let go, and it stopped.”

Natasha’s jaw tightened again. A short burst, triggered by touch. Controlled enough to stop—or instinctive enough to pull back. Either way, it wasn’t random. She glanced at Wendy, still knotted in the chair, using Tony’s hand as an anchor. The girl’s head was down again, hair shielding her face. Too still.

Pepper stepped closer, voice low but firm. “She needs rest, Natasha. We can figure this out later.”

Natasha didn’t argue. Rest wouldn’t erase the damage, but it might steady the kid. She nodded once, crisply, and shifted her weight. Her eyes caught the server wall—glass shattered, but the tech behind it was intact. No data lost. Yet.

Clint finished the splint, standing with a grunt. “She’s not wrong,” he said, jerking his head toward Pepper. “Let’s call it. At least take an extended lunch.”

Natasha didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. Her silence was agreement enough.

But her mind didn’t stop. The chair’s arc—fifteen feet, angled upward. It had come very close to her head. The table’s crack—pressure, not impact. Wendy’s restraint—trained, not accidental. Patterns within patterns.

And that plea: “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

Natasha had said it once, years ago, to a handler’s corpse. She hadn’t meant it either—until she did.

She turned away, boots crunching glass, and headed for the server room. Someone had to check the systems. Someone had to look for the next thread.

She’d find it.

Natasha didn’t argue—just gave that curt nod of hers, the one that meant fine, but I’m not done . She straightened, stepping back, her boots silent on the glass. Clint watched her drift toward the servers, probably itching to poke at something technical. That was her deal—find the thread, pull it apart. His deal was simpler: keep the team standing.

He looked back at Tony and Wendy. The kid’s shoulders had eased a fraction, her hand still in his. Tony’s face was a wreck—red-rimmed eyes, jaw tight—but he wasn’t letting go. Clint’s chest did something funny, a quick ache he didn’t bother naming. Parents were supposed to be able to tell their kids that their nightmares weren’t real, that the monsters couldn’t hurt them. Except here, they could. They already had.

“She’s not gonna hurt anyone,” Tony said, loud enough to carry this time, like he’d heard Clint’s thoughts. His voice was rough, scraped raw. “Not on purpose.”

Clint tilted his head, studying him. “Yeah, I get that. But she’s scared, Stark. Scared kids do dumb things.”

Tony’s eyes flicked up, sharp for a second, then softened. “She’s not dumb.”

“Didn’t say she was,” Clint shot back, keeping it light. “Said she’s scared. Big difference.”

Wendy’s head lifted, just enough to peek through her hair. Blue eyes, wet and wide, caught his for a heartbeat before dropping again. Clint’s throat tightened. Damn it.

Clint pushed off the stairs, brushing his hands together. Glass crunched under his boots as he looked at Steve, checking the splint one last time. “You good, Cap?”

“Good enough,” Steve said, flexing his fingers. “I’ll live.”

“Famous last words,” Clint muttered, but he clapped Steve’s shoulder anyway.

The man sat in the chair, leaning back and resting his arm on the tabletop. Just another Friday, not like his arm was busted to hell. That was the thing about Steve that Clint had learned quickly—his pain never got loud.

“Probably need to eat something, right?” Clint asked.

Steve gave him a noncommittal grunt that probably translated to ‘It’s fine, I’ve had worse,’ which was exactly the kind of answer Clint expected from a guy who once crashed a plane into the Arctic on purpose.

Clint smirked, shaking his head. “Yeah, you’re a real hero, Rogers. Go get a burger or twelve before you pass out.” 

He stepped back, giving Steve room, but his eyes drifted to the mess around them. Glass everywhere, tea pooling near the broken mug, that damn chair sticking out of the glass like a bad art project. He’d seen worse—hell, he’d caused worse—but this felt different. Heavy. Like the air was holding its breath.

Pepper was still hovering near Tony and Wendy, her phone in hand now, texting fast. Probably rescheduling her life again. The woman was a machine—Clint didn’t know how she kept up with Stark, let alone this. Tony was whispering lowly to the kid, who nodded in response. Progress, maybe.

Clint rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the day settle into his bones. He wasn’t built for this—teenagers with powers, Tony playing dad, HYDRA lurking somewhere in the shadows. Give him a bow, a target, and a clean shot. That, he could handle. This? A nebulous amalgamation of an enemy without a face. This was a mess he couldn’t aim at.

And then there was Wendy.

It still felt strange to use that name like it belonged to her. He’d woken up that morning to a text from Tony:

STARK: Wendy-Anne Maria Stark. Call her Wendy. Don’t make a big deal of it. (23:12)

It was a simple request, and if he had set aside time to consider everything he’d learnt about the girl, a logical conclusion. Not the name HYDRA gave her, some twisted knife aimed at Tony’s back. Not a codename or a file label. Just—Wendy. Wendy-Anne. It sounded too soft for what she’d survived. Too normal. 

But that was probably the point.

He rubbed the back of his neck, watching as Tony urged the kid out of the chair. Any of the man’s previous hesitance about touching her seemed to have flown out the window.

Speaking of, it was a miracle she kicked that chair to the left and not the right, or this room would’ve been much colder from the altitude and the sharp January wind.

His eyes drifted back to Wendy. Tony was still there, still holding on. The kid wasn’t shaking anymore—standing, breathing, letting him stay close. Tony wasn’t offering muffled reassurances anymore, his face a cracking statue. Clint didn’t know what she’d been through—not the details—but he knew that look. Knew it from Laura’s face when he’d come home bruised and quiet. Knew it from his own mirror, some nights.

Tony wasn’t the guy Clint would’ve pegged for this—fatherhood, or whatever this was—but he was doing it. Messy, sure. But doing it.

Clint’s gut said that mattered.

“Don’t think this is the last time,” he said quietly.

Steve raised a brow.

Clint shrugged. “Not trying to be grim. Just—feels like we’ve opened a can of worms we can’t close.”

Steve nodded once, tired. “I know.”

There was a long pause, and then Steve asked, “You scared of her?”

Clint took his time answering. Not because he didn’t know, but because the truth was complicated.

“No,” he said at last. “But I’m scared for her.”

He really needed to call his kids.

Natasha didn’t follow them.

Didn’t move when the elevator closed, didn’t speak when the room quieted. Just stood there, hand still braced on the edge of the server rack, eyes unfocused on its blinking lights. They weren’t the reason her pulse was tight in her throat.

It was the girl’s eyes.

Wendy had flinched. It was entirely justified. But then she went stationary.

She had frozen.

Natasha had seen that kind of stillness before. In a Red Room dormitory, in the barracks at Dreykov’s compound, in herself. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t calm. It was control so absolute it came from terror too deep to name.

Her fingers flexed. She hated the shape of that recognition.

Behind her, Steve pushed up from the chair with a soft grunt and the rattle of his splint. “I’m grabbing food. Want anything?”

She didn’t answer right away. Then: “No.”

He paused, like he might say something else. He didn’t. Just nodded once and headed for the elevator.

Clint had drifted toward the far wall, phone already in his hand, tension bleeding off him in waves now that Wendy was gone. Natasha knew that posture, too. A man who’d nearly snapped, and wasn’t sure if he’d been right not to.

She didn’t blame him. Not for the bluntness in his response. Not for seeing the pattern.

Because she’d seen it too.

They’ve just entered a holding pattern—circling, waiting, engines idling while the storm brewed below. Natasha knew the rhythm from missions gone sideways: the pause before the drop, when you could hear the wind but not see the ground. Wendy was the plane, unsteady but aloft; Tony and the team were the wings, straining to keep her steady. She was the radar, tracking the blips—HYDRA’s looming shadow, Wendy’s memories, the inevitable crash if they didn’t land soon. The air was thick with it, and she hated waiting. 

“JARVIS,” she said quietly. “Secure a video copy of everything from the last twenty minutes. Isolate Wendy’s biometric spikes and motor activity. Restrict playback access to myself, Tony, and the team only.”

“Understood, Agent Romanoff,” came the soft reply.

She stared at the glowing bank of servers a moment longer. Then, finally, turned away.

They were running out of time.

Chapter Text

When Tony was six years old, he accompanied his parents to a Stark Industries factory unveiling in upstate New York. Rochester, maybe—some nowhere town of no consequence to him with a shiny new plant Howard had sunk millions into. Missile guidance systems, the kind that’d make the Pentagon drool. It was October, cold as hell, with floodlights blasting through the dusk like the world needed to see every bolt. 

Brass bands, suits with cigars, his mother wore a green dress that shimmered like oil. Tony wore a suit too—itchy, too tight, shoes pinching his toes. It had very clearly been Howard’s idea—parade the family, show the cameras a legacy. Stark Industries wasn’t just a company; it was a dynasty, and Tony was the proof. He was a prop, not a kid.

Howard worked the room with big laughs and bigger promises. Generals in medals, executives in pinstripes, all eating out of his hand. The factory was a beast—steel guts, glass skin, machines humming like they were alive. Tony could still hear it—clinking glasses, the low growl of assembly lines, his father’s voice cutting through: “This is the future, gentlemen.” He meant the tech, not the kid trailing behind Maria, tugging at her sleeve. She smiled—thin, tired—sipping wine, keeping him close until she didn’t.

During the tour, Tony slipped away from Maria. He couldn’t help it—he was six years old, stuck in a sea of legs and noise. He found the control room, with all its switches and screens, and a joystick that begged to be touched. 

He didn’t know yet that curiosity was a liability—two years later, he’d learn to bury it under Howard’s glare, but that night, it was just a kid’s itch, pure and dumb. He’d earned this one.

He grabbed it—it reminded him of the control panel of his RC1 on-road pan car—and something whirred. An autonomous vehicle jerked off its stand, flew ten feet, and crashed into a table. There was glass everywhere and a lot of yelling.

Tony learned early on that his father was fascinated with warfare throughout history. Their mansion in Lenox Hill had an entire study dedicated to the advancement of weaponry throughout American history. One of his favourites to speak about was Austrian artillery lieutenant Franz von Uchatius, who invented the balloon bomb. That story ran through his mind when Howard grabbed his hand with bruising force, pulling him away from the panel.

That flying vehicle, however unassuming, could have carried something incredibly dangerous.

Howard had hauled him back, hissing through gritted teeth to stay put . And his apology to the guests was drowned out by laughter, cheers of “Chip off the old block, Howard!” and “A regular genius, blowing things up!”

His hand was locked in Howard’s grip for the remainder of the evening, including their arrival home. The man had pulled him through the door, Maria following behind, continuing his tirade from the forty-five-minute car ride in the Bentley. At least the man had been distracted on the flight from Rochester to Flushing, piloting with Jarvis.

“You humiliated me. You need to exhibit some self-control.”

Howard’s obsession with legacy shaped his childhood to the point where he tried everything in his power to tarnish that legacy through his misadventures. Howard Stark would be known for the Manhattan Project, building an empire through Stark Industries, and his son, the eccentric genius more concerned with having a good time than building a good world.

As an adult, Tony was able to remind himself that pioneers such as Franz von Uchatius were also responsible for inventions like the “Lantern Wheel of Light,” which was a kinetoscope. He was the forgotten father of the motion picture camera.

His point that he was so arduously trying to make to himself was that creation could be more than destruction—that a kid’s mistake didn’t have to define the future, didn’t have to be a bomb waiting to drop. Howard never saw that. Tony would.

When the elevator doors opened onto the Common floor, he saw the parallel.

Wendy’s hand had remained in his grip, firm. Pepper standing behind them.

This would go a different way.

The common room stretched out—couches, the kitchen still lit from that morning, curtained windows filtering that gray January light that made everything look half-dead. There was no glass on the floor, no splintered oak. Just quiet. Too quiet, maybe, after the 93rd floor turned into a war zone—Wendy’s war zone. 

Tony’s chest tightened, the memory of her flinch still burned in, her voice— “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

He promised her safety. Trust. He had no idea how to deliver on that.

He guided her to the couch, her steps small, her hand still locked in his. Pepper moved past, her heels a soft click toward the kitchen—water, probably, or tea. Tony sat, easing Wendy down beside him, her weight slight but heavy somehow. He didn’t let go. Couldn’t.

What do you say to a kid who just broke a super-soldier’s wrist without trying? Nice grip, kid —no, that’s Howard, all sharp edges and louder disappointment. You okay? —too soft, too hollow after what he’d seen, her frozen form, grasping for something she could control. Don’t do that again —Christ, no, that’s Howard too, the tirade in the Bentley, the grip that bruised. He’d spent forty-five minutes hearing he was a screw-up; Wendy didn’t need that. Not from him.

So he didn’t say anything. He watched instead.

Dark hair spilled over her face, shoulders hunched like she could shrink away from it all. Six years old, he’d hunched too, staring at his hands while Howard raged. Wendy’s hands were still now, one curled in her lap, the other still in his, knuckles pale. Restraint. 

Like she knew what she could do and hated it. 

Tony’s throat caught—he doubted Howard ever saw him like that, never cared enough to look. He’d just yelled, demanded control Tony didn’t have. Wendy had it, though—too much, maybe—and it scared him more than the chaos upstairs.

Pepper came back, setting a glass of water on the table, her fingers brushing his arm as she sat on his other side. Steady, like always. 

Tony’s mind spun in circles—what not to say was easy: no lectures, no blame, nothing that’d make her flinch again. But what to say? He’d promised trust, knelt in the wreckage, and meant it, but words felt like traps now. Howard’s voice kept creeping in— “You humiliated me” —and Tony shoved it down. Not here. Not her.

She hadn’t, anyway. Humiliated him. 

What he really wanted to do was hold her. 

Every second she stayed frozen like this, something awful coiled in his chest—panic, grief, that creeping dread of becoming the thing he swore he’d never be.

He shifted. Just an inch. Close enough to feel her warmth, not enough to crowd.

Her stillness wasn’t new; he’d seen it in the mirror, nights after Howard’s rants, when he’d sit on his bed, hands clenched, waiting for the yelling to stop. Wendy wasn’t waiting for a yell—she was waiting for something worse, maybe. Punishment. Blame. Whatever HYDRA had drilled into her before she came to him. Tony’s jaw tightened—those bastards didn’t get to keep that hold. Not on her.

He glanced at her hands again—small, pale, one still in his. At six, he’d crashed that drone, and Howard made it a war crime. Wendy’s crash was bigger—Steve’s wrist, the table, the chair—and he’d knelt instead, held her instead. No tirade. No bruise. 

He wasn’t Howard, not yet, not ever if he could help it.

Maybe that was the formula, he thought suddenly. Just do everything the opposite.

Well, if that’s the case—

Tony didn’t move fast, but he moved swiftly. Raising the hand holding hers, he wove his arm around her upper body, guiding her to rest against his chest. 

“Let’s just sit for a while,” he said quietly. He felt her body push into his, like she was done holding herself up. It was that release of tension he’d done with Ana, locked in his bedroom growing up. Just a moment to allow someone else to carry the burden of living, of experiencing pain. Let someone else do the work for now.

If Tony was able to provide that for her, he will have succeeded. 

Pepper’s head fell against his other shoulder, and his heart rate, which he hadn’t noticed was still pounding fast, started to calm.

Take that, Howard.

Time passed slowly. Or quickly. For once, he didn’t keep track. Tony didn’t remember the last time he had sat without doing something . He was a man who hated being stationary, hated not using his hands or his mind.

But sitting here with his daughter against his side—it wasn’t so hard. 

Vaguely, he registered when Pepper had to get up. Had to go run his company. She had pressed her lips to his temple, hand trailing over the back of his neck, and his right side felt cold in her absence. 

His head had found purchase on hers, and he relished in the lack of tension in the girl’s body. He thought maybe he was doing something right. 

But he wasn’t built to stay still for long.

Wendy’s breathing evened out—slow, steady, not asleep but calmer than she’d been all day. Tony’s mind drifted, not to 93, not to Howard’s tirades, but to that flicker of an idea from earlier—Uchatius, the guy with the bombs and the lights. Not the destruction, the other part—spinning glass, moving pictures, hands making something instead of breaking it. 

His hands twitched, restless even now, but it wasn’t about him. It was her—those small, pale hands that could do more than hurt.

Instead of filling the void with empty reassurances, he had an idea—a way to channel this raw energy into something tangible.

He shifted, careful not to jostle her.

“Hey,” he said, voice low, testing. Her head lifted, just enough to look at him—blue eyes, still sharp despite the haze. “Come with me.”

Tony moved purposefully toward the small multipurpose space where Wendy and Natasha had practiced tai chi earlier that morning. The area was cluttered with old boxes, a repository of forgotten paperwork and artifacts from Malibu, the Crown Building, Arlington. Boxes from Lenox Hill were still stacked there, half-unpacked relics of his past.

Tony rummaged methodically until his fingers brushed against a rolled-up schematic. His pulse quickened—not with excitement but with a recognition of potential—that tickle of his senses that built every time inspiration struck. The blueprint was weathered, but the delicate diagrams spoke of an invention from over a hundred years ago.

Clutching the schematic, Tony turned toward Wendy. 

“Grab your boots,” he said gently. “I’ll get you a T-shirt or something we can get dirty.” His tone wasn’t commanding—it was a soft invitation to do something together, something constructive.

Wendy’s eyes flickered. Without a word, she turned and drifted toward her room. Tony waited a moment, then made his way to the stairs. He skipped the elevator entirely, taking the stairs three at a time, his thoughts racing as he ascended into his private quarters. He sure was getting his steps in today.

There, amidst neatly folded clothes and a pile of dry-cleaning he had yet to hang back up, he found a worn sweatshirt—the kind of piece that spoke of better, simpler days.

With the hoodie tucked under his arm, he returned to the common area. At the doorway, Wendy was finishing lacing her boots, her posture no longer as guarded as before. He offered her the sweatshirt with a small, encouraging smile. 

“Change into this,” he said quietly. “It isn’t fancy, but it’s comfy and not Natasha’s, so if it gets ruined, I won’t be maimed in my sleep over it.”

She caught it, hesitated, then walked back to her room. Tony was about to stop her, point her to a closer bathroom, but honestly, it wasn’t worth the distraction. 

When she returned, she was wearing the hoodie—too big, making her frame look drowned, but it worked. Tony led her to the elevator, up to the penthouse floor, guiding her up the curved stairs and into his private lab. The door slid open, revealing his sanctuary.

Wendy stepped in, slowly, eyes darting, taking in the chaos, the order beneath it. A whir caught her attention—DUM-E had woken from his charging nap, beeping a greeting, claw clicking, head tilting like a curious dog. Her eyes widened dramatically as DUM-E rolled forward with speed. Tony smirked. 

“That’s DUM-E. Don’t mind him—he’s harmless, just nosy.” She froze, then reached out, brushing the bot’s arm. DUM-E chirped, and something in her shoulders eased. DUM-E’s claw poked her in the chest.

“DUM-E, you break it, you bought it,” he scolded, moving toward one of his benches with the least amount of clutter. “Be gentle with my ward.”

“This is so cool,” a quiet whisper met his ears, and his eyes darted back to the kid who was walking a slow circle around DUM-E, who was all too happy to be the center of attention.

The smile that crept over Tony’s face was beyond his control. “That’s your brother. Technically. Kind of. U and Butterfingers are in the Edison Lab.”

Her head jerked in his direction, glancing his way for barely a second before returning to her inspection. Sufficiently distracted. It allowed him to gather all the tools he needed to make this work. He grabbed a parts tray—an illusion of organization—and filled it with everything they’d require.

He clapped his hands, looking back at her. “Okay. You ready?”

The girl laid a gentle hand on DUM-E’s claw once more before joining him at the table. “Ready for what?”

“This,” Tony said, placing the schematic between them, “is either a science project, a forgotten steampunk prop, or an over-complicated night light. We’ll find out together.”

Wendy didn’t smile. Not quite. But something behind her eyes flickered—recognition, maybe. Curiosity. The survival reflex of a mind that once solved mazes blindfolded, just to keep itself sane. He could work with that.

He tapped the schematic again. “Ever heard of Franz von Uchatius?”

“He’s the balloon guy,” she said. And seemed surprised by her own words. “The precursor to the drone.”

Tony grinned. “Correct. Austrian guy. Military engineer. Bit of a show-off, which means I respect him immensely. What a lot of people forget is that, in the 1850s, he was trying to project motion by cranking a light source behind drawings on a spinning glass disk. Basically: the first movie, but with more risk of fire and probably some very dramatic mustaches.”

Her fingers brushed the edge of the schematic. Quietly. He caught it and kept going.

“Here’s the kicker—he tried it first with multiple lanterns and a torch. As in, he walked around lighting each one manually. No way it worked like he said, but the effort? That’s art. Eventually, he built what he called the Lantern Wheel of Light. Used limelight—calcium oxide heated by a hydrogen flame. Guy was nothing if not committed.”

Tony reached for his parts tray, thankful this idea of his required simple materials—gears, glass, a mini-LED to stand in for the limelight, because modern OSHA would probably frown upon a fifteen-year-old wielding nineteenth-century explosives.

“Like I said before, the first version was just a bunch of magic lanterns lined up, and he walked behind them with a torch—like, literally, carried the light behind each one. Try doing that without singeing your eyebrows off.”

A flicker. Not quite a smile, but something.

Tony pulled a sketch onto the holo-display, rotating it with a flick of his fingers. “Later, he built a glass disk with shuttered images, cranked it by hand, and made them dance. Not a projector, not quite animation. But it worked. Kind of. He was trying to teach soldiers, not entertain kids, so… call it multitasking.”

Tony picked up one of the slotted disks, rotating it gently between his fingers. “The shutter has to move with the light. Not faster. Not slower. Just… in time.”

It wasn’t subtle. He didn’t care. She was smart—she’d get the metaphor.

“Today,” Tony said, taking a deep breath, “you and I are gonna build it. If you’re up for it.”

Wendy examined the parts tray and the schematic with an air of confused concentration. Then, her eyes met his. Intrepid and indomitable.

“Where do you want me?” she asked, voice rough but steady.

Tony didn’t grin, but he exhaled something like relief.

“Right here,” he said, shifting tools toward her. “You’re on picture detail. All you need to do is fill these disks with something we can watch move. This thing’s got twelve lenses. And like… six hundred opportunities for frustration. I don’t know—I’m not an artist.”

Wendy hesitated, her fingers twitching. Tony saw the minor flicker of doubt. He didn’t push, just waited, leaning on the bench. Her hand moved—slowly and deliberately—taking the marker. She traced a line, shaky at first, then firmer.

Tony nodded, faintly. “Good. That’s it.”

He set up the base—motor, lenses—and let her work the glass. She didn’t talk, focused on her task. The marker squeaked, her lines jagged but intentional. Tony watched Wendy’s hands—energy channeled and direct, not frozen. She was creating something.

He thought of Uchatius again—running with a torch, chasing motion, failing until he didn’t. Tony’s own failures stacked high—Rochester, Stane, Lauran… truly, half his entire life could be considered one big mistake after the next—but this wasn’t one of them. 

Wendy’s disk took shape, twelve little drawings, rough but all of her own design. From what he could tell, it was a little stick figure jumping up and down. 

Eventually, Wendy spoke.

“What did he do when it didn’t work?”

Tony didn’t look up from the magnifying tool he was adjusting. “Probably cursed a lot in German. Maybe Bairisch. Then he tried again.”

Wendy nodded once. The gear clicked into place.

And there it was: motion.

The disk began to spin under his fingers—slow, halting, but moving. One image, then the next. It was not flawless or clean, but it was moving.

“Look at that,” Tony murmured. “Light in motion. Persistence of vision. You know what that means?”

Wendy shook her head again, but this time she was watching the flickering sequence, the story she was creating, frame by frame.

“It means the eye remembers light even after it’s gone,” he said. “Long enough to believe something’s still there.”

Wendy’s breath caught—barely audible, but there. Tony’s throat tightened again, not dread this time, just something softer.

“See?” he said, voice low. “Not everything you touch has to break.”

She didn’t answer, but her fingers lingered on the crank, turning it once more. Tony let her—let her see it move, let her hold it. Creation, not destruction.

Wendy’s lips parted open, and a smile slowly grew over her face, wonder in her blue eyes. Face soft and young.

It was only then that he realized what sweatshirt he had provided her: a Cardinal red hoodie with the words “MIT Class of ‘86.”

She looked so much like her mom.

Chapter Text

The lock on Steve’s floor gave way with a soft click—child’s play, even for Stark’s tech. It was probably intentional, a simplistic design to avoid overwhelming the Good Captain. Natasha slipped inside, boots silent on the hardwood. The air smelled of coffee and something hearty—steak, maybe, cooling on a plate at the table. A radio played softly, some 1940s crooner whose name she didn’t know. Steve stood at the sink, one-handed, his brace a sleek cage around his right wrist. He didn’t turn, but his shoulders shifted—he knew she was there.

“You ever knock?” he said, voice steady but worn.

“Not really,” Natasha replied, leaning against the doorframe. Her eyes flicked to the brace—Stark’s work, over-engineered, probably nagging him with diagnostics. He must’ve swung by the MedLab after he left the 93rd floor, Clint’s splint nowhere to be seen.

“Your wrist?”

“Healing.” He set a glass down, carefully, and faced her.

“Good,” Natasha nodded, stepping inside but keeping her distance. She wasn’t here for pleasantries, and Steve wasn’t the type to drag them out.

Steve didn’t ask why she was there. He just wiped his hands on a towel, folded it once, and draped it over the counter like it mattered.

“Still think it’s nothing?” Natasha asked, nodding toward his wrist.

He looked down at it, flexed his fingers slightly in the brace. “I think it was an accident,” he said. “Not the same thing.”

Natasha didn’t argue. Not yet. She stepped closer to the table but didn’t sit, her fingers curling around the top of a chair.

“You remember what she said?” she asked. “About Banner.”

Steve straightened, shoulders drawing up. “Yeah,” he said. “Called him a victim.”

Natasha’s gaze was steady. “That bother you?”

He didn’t answer right away. “I just don’t know what she meant.”

“She knows something, obviously,” Natasha said. “Not like she was guessing. Something happened .”

Steve nodded slowly. “He’s been off the grid since New York. Spent a couple of days with Stark, then—gone.”

“At first, it made sense. That’s what he does, right? Stay low. Stay moving.”

“But?”

“But Tony sent him an invite, same as us. A safe floor, his own lab, whatever he needs.” She folded her arms. “That was over a week ago. No answer.”

Steve’s brow furrowed. “We just assumed he wasn’t ready.”

“Yeah. But now?” Natasha’s voice lowered. “Wendy said he was a target. That HYDRA wanted him. That the Winter Soldier—whoever he is—has done worse than we’ve seen, right under our noses.”

Steve looked down at the brace again, then out the window. “If HYDRA knew where he was…”

They both went quiet.

The elevator chimed, and Clint stepped out, hoodie up, coffee in hand.

“Door was open,” he said, pausing in the entry like he’d caught the tail end of something he didn’t want to know.

Natasha didn’t look away. “You always show up when we’re about to say something terrible.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot.” Clint dropped into a chair. “So, what terrible news are we discussing now?”

Natasha’s arms didn’t uncross. “Banner.”

Clint’s face shifted, just slightly. “Still MIA?”

Steve nodded. “And she said he was a victim. Of HYDRA.”

Clint walked farther in, pulled out a chair, and sat. “You think they got to him?”

“I think we don’t know,” Natasha said. “And that’s the problem.”

Clint took a slow sip of coffee. “Harlem crossed my mind. Ross chased him through half the country after that. But that was years ago.”

“That was the Army,” Steve said. “This is different. This is HYDRA.”

“Nothing was stopping them from infiltrating the army, too,” Clint commented.

Natasha’s jaw tensed. “Wendy doesn’t seem the type to use a word like ‘victim’ lightly.”

“She wouldn’t say it unless she meant it,” Steve agreed. “Unless it stuck with her.”

“And now we can’t even ask him,” Clint said, more to himself than anyone else. “Hell, maybe he’s just lying low again. Or maybe…”

He didn’t finish it.

“Or maybe he never made it out of New York,” Natasha said quietly. “Not really.”

Steve looked at her. “We should’ve looked sooner.”

“We didn’t have a reason,” Clint said. “Now we do.”

Steve’s jaw set, the brace on his wrist catching the light as he pushed back from the table. “JARVIS?”

“Yes, Captain?” The AI’s voice was crisp, filling the room like it had been waiting.

“Pull up everything we’ve got on Banner—last known location, communiques, anything from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s logs.”

“And check for gamma signatures,” Clint added. “Anywhere, anytime since May.”

“Accessing,” JARVIS replied. The radio’s jazz cut out as screens flickered to life on the wall—maps, data streams, Quinjet flight paths.

Natasha stepped to the display, her fingers brushing the interface, pulling up Bruce’s last ping. “May 6, 2012—Stark Tower. GPS in the Acura he was driving registered stopping in New Jersey and then—nothing.”

Clint leaned over her shoulder, coffee forgotten. “He could’ve ditched it, gone to ground. Bruce knows how to disappear.”

“But not from HYDRA,” Natasha said, her voice low. She tapped the screen, zooming in on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secure server—encrypted, but not to her. “Let’s see what they had on him post-Harlem.”

Steve watched, arms crossed, his face unreadable. “You think S.H.I.E.L.D. was tracking him?”

“They tried.” Natasha’s fingers flew, bypassing firewalls with practiced ease. “Ross had eyes on him until 2010—Brazil, Calcutta. Then he slipped. S.H.I.E.L.D. picked up the slack, but Bruce was careful. Last entry was from April 2012—pre-Chitauri. Nothing after.”

Clint whistled softly. “So he’s been a ghost for eight months. That’s not good.”

“Or it’s exactly what he wanted,” Steve said, but his tone lacked conviction. He glanced at the map—red dots marking Bruce’s old haunts: Rio, Kolkata, a clinic in Uganda. “He doesn’t stay put. But if HYDRA’s hunting him…”

“They’d need a reason,” Natasha finished. She pulled up a new layer—S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intel. From where they stood, it was just as likely that the data belonged to HYDRA, too. “Let’s assume they wanted his research—gamma, the Hulk. They’d send someone good.”

Clint’s eyes narrowed. “You think they grabbed him? Turned him?”

“No.” Steve’s voice was firm. “Bruce wouldn’t let that happen. He’d… he’d stop it.”

Natasha didn’t look at him, but her fingers stilled. “Unless they didn’t give him a choice.”

The room went quiet, the radio’s static filling the gap. JARVIS broke it—“Gamma spike detected, rural Manitoba, December 28, 2012. Faint, but consistent with Dr. Banner’s profile.”

Natasha’s pulse jumped. “Manitoba. That’s… remote. What’s in the area?”

“Checking,” JARVIS said. “There is a free clinic in Churchill—small. It’s understaffed. Dr. Banner’s known to volunteer in such areas.”

Clint straightened. “That’s a lead. Better than nothing.”

Steve nodded, his jaw tight. “We need to check it out. If he’s there, or was…”

“Hold on,” Natasha said, her eyes on the screen. She pulled up S.H.I.E.L.D.’s black site list—a list that technically didn’t exist. One pinged near the Manitoba border—abandoned, supposedly. “There’s a facility, decommissioned. But if HYDRA’s active within S.H.I.E.L.D….”

“They could’ve used it,” Clint finished. “Stash him, run tests, whatever.”

“Is there anything even strong enough to hold the Hulk?” Natasha asked a stupid question that had an obvious answer, but her gut was steadily filling with dread.

Steve’s hand clenched, brace whirring softly. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Natasha didn’t move, her mind racing. Manitoba was a shot, better than she’d assumed they could find. But Bruce was a needle in a frozen haystack, and HYDRA didn’t leave tracks. 

Although… if HYRDA was hiding within S.H.I.E.L.D., they do leave a trail.

“JARVIS,” she said, “cross-reference any comms traffic near Churchill—encrypted, low-band. And check for Ross’ old ops. If he was sniffing around, S.H.I.E.L.D. might’ve followed.”

“Processing,” JARVIS replied. The screens flickered—data streams, radio intercepts. A beat later: “Encrypted signal detected, December 30, 2012. Origin: 50 miles south of Churchill. Content unreadable.”

Clint’s eyes sharpened. “That’s not a coincidence.”

“No,” Natasha agreed, her voice tight. “It’s a trail.”

Steve pushed to his feet, brace glinting. “We leave at dawn. Clint, prep the jet for tomorrow. Nat, see what else you can pull.”

Clint clapped Steve’s shoulder, light but firm. “On it, Cap.” He headed for the door, coffee left behind.

Natasha lingered, her gaze on the map—Manitoba, a pinprick of light. Bruce was there, or had been. She was sure of it. She’d find him. 

HYDRA didn’t get to keep this one.

Steve’s voice broke her focus, low and steady. “You think we’re too late?”

She met his eyes, her face unreadable. “I think we’re going to find out.”

Natasha followed Clint’s steps through Steve’s door, and the elevator was waiting. The elevator doors slid shut, JARVIS’s hum filling the silence. 

“Where would you like to go, Agent Romanoff?”

Natasha didn’t answer right away. She let her head rest lightly against the cool elevator wall, eyes closed. Her body was still, but her mind kept moving—calculating, cataloging. If they were right, Bruce might be out there—hurt, hunted, maybe worse. And if they were being watched, if S.H.I.E.L.D. was already compromised, then she needed her team as steady as possible. She needed them sharp.

And that included Tony.

“Where’s Tony and Wendy?”

“They are in Sir’s private lab,” JARVIS said.

“Take me there,” she said finally.

“Of course, Agent Romanoff.”

The elevator shifted, ascending. Lights flickered past behind the glass wall, the gentle hum of the Tower a constant in her ears. She had given them space, filled the past hours going through her mission logs, trying to tell what could have been HYDRA’s orders from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s, trying to smother the building worry for Bruce, for Wendy, for Tony.

All things considered, Tony was doing pretty well with his new responsibilities. But Wendy’s little show on the 93rd floor changed the game.

And if Wendy was with him, then Natasha needed to be, too.

It wasn’t just about protection anymore. It was pattern recognition. Intuition.

If something was happening to the people they couldn’t reach—Banner, who knows who else—then Wendy wasn’t safe just because she was under a Stark roof.

It still remained that the girl had probably never been safe in her entire life.

The doors opened.

The hallway beyond was quiet, humming faintly with light and power. Natasha stepped out soundlessly; her instinct softened her steps. She followed the muted glow spilling from behind the lab doors. 

Inside, she could already hear it—low, unintelligible voices, something metallic being shifted, and the occasional ping of a calibrator being placed back into its cradle. 

She didn’t have permanent access to his personal lab. She had to wait for them to either notice she was there or for JARVIS to sell her out.

For now, though, she just watched through the glass.

The lab itself was a sprawl of controlled disorder. Workbenches stretched across the room, littered with tools—wrenches, circuit boards, and half-assembled gadgets glinting under the harsh overhead lights. A holo-display flickered in the corner, its blue light casting shifting patterns across the walls, while schematics pinned haphazardly to a board fluttered faintly in the draft from a cooling fan. The air likely hummed with the low thrum of servers. This was Tony’s sanctuary, a reflection of his mind—brilliant, chaotic, and utterly his.

But it wasn’t the same as Malibu.

That lab had been carved into concrete and glass, the garage of a cliffside mansion with too little light and not enough warmth. Classic cars lined the back wall like museum pieces. She’d only entered it once, as part of her assignment, but the walls had radiated spring heat long after sunset, and the whole place had smelled faintly of ozone and motor oil. It had been utilitarian—brilliant, but sterile. Isolated. Whatever touches of personality existed came from JARVIS’s holograms or Pepper’s quiet attempts to humanize it. It had felt like a bunker dressed up as a playground.

The Tower lab was different.

It was warmer. Not in temperature, but in tone. Concrete was traded for steel, but it didn’t feel any colder. The clutter was intentional now—more lived-in, less performative. A coffee mug sat abandoned beside an arc welder. A hoodie was draped over a chair that hadn’t been designed as a laundry basket. One of the tool drawers didn’t close all the way—she doubted Tony even noticed. None of it had been curated for show. It wasn’t meant to impress anyone.

Natasha had never known Tony to nest. But something in this room felt like that.

Tony was crouched beside a terminal, one hand bracing a schematic while the other held out a part Wendy clearly wasn’t sure how to use. His posture was casual, knees bent and shoulders loose, but his focus was razor-sharp, guiding her with a voice likely laced with sarcasm, knowing him, wrapped around instruction like muscle around a bone. He wore a faded band tee, smudged with grease, layered over a long-sleeved compression shirt. His hair was tousled from work, but his eyes were bright and alive.

Wendy sat on a stool beside him, oversized red hoodie sleeves pushed up to her elbows to free her hands. Those hands hovered over the circuitry, deliberate. Her brow furrowed in concentration, lips parted just a fraction as she absorbed Tony’s words. There was a softness to her, a quiet intensity.  She was learning.

It was a complete shift from the last time Natasha saw them—both of their eyes rimmed with red, one mute and shaking, the other held together through sheer spite. Now, in the glow of the lab, their vulnerability was different, softer. Wendy’s shoulders weren’t hunched in defense; Tony’s hands weren’t clenched in frustration. They were creating, side by side.

Natasha heard JARVIS’s muffled voice, likely alerting them to her presence. Tony responded, and the lab doors slid open.

Tony’s smirk faltered just slightly. “You get a sudden hankering for electrical engineering, Romanoff?”

Natasha ignored the joke. Her eyes went to Wendy first. The girl looked up from the workbench, her hands stilling over the tangle of circuits, blue eyes wide but steady under the weight of Natasha’s attention.

“You okay?” she asked, her voice quieter now. Not just in tone—open, in the way she rarely let it be.

Wendy blinked at her, then nodded. Once. Honest. She seemed much more settled. 

Natasha stepped further in, the lab doors whispering shut behind her. She took in the scene fully now: the scattered half-finished projects, the glowing holo-display, the walls lined with Tony’s eclectic mix of genius and mess. On the table to her right was some kind of projector contraption, shockingly retro and low-tech. DUM-E was using his claw to rotate a plumber's wrench that was wrapped around a crank. She looked up, seeing a little stick figure moving jerkily around on the ceiling.

Tony leaned against the bench, arms crossed casually, but his eyes were sharp. He was watching her with that familiar blend of curiosity and wariness.

“We’ve pinpointed a possible last known for Banner,” she said, not beating around the bush. “We’re headed out tomorrow morning.”

Wendy’s brow furrowed, her hands pausing completely over the workbench, fingers hovering as if caught mid-thought. “Dr. Bruce Banner?”

The two adults turned to her, movements nearly synchronised. Natasha kept her face impassive, but her posture shifted slightly—shoulders squaring, attention honing in like a blade. “You said the Winter Soldier went after him…”

Wendy slapped her hand over her face, grimacing, a flush creeping up her neck. “I’m sorry. I keep fucking up my words. I don’t think the Soldier killed him. We would’ve heard about it no matter where I was.”

“Then what did you mean?” Tony asked. Natasha clocked a wave of relief running through him, strangled by the concern in his voice.

Wendy’s hand drifted from her face to her neck, a tender grip over her throat as if anchoring herself against the weight of her words. “HYDRA wants to control the Hulk,” she stated. “But, obviously, they can’t contain him. So they want to refine the process. Recreate him. I heard they sent the Soldier after him, likely to steal his research and… put down anyone in the way.”

“So he’s alive.” A weight Natasha wasn’t aware of lifted from her chest, a subtle release of tension that left her breathing just a fraction easier. Her eyes flicked to Wendy, then back to Tony, who stood frozen for a moment, processing. 

Wendy shrugged. “The Soldier probably wasn’t able to kill him if the tanks couldn’t.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact, but her gaze dropped to the workbench, her fingers tracing the edge of a schematic absently, as if the motion could brace her.

Tony turned to Natasha, his expression focused, cutting through the lab’s hum. “What did you find?”

“Your satellites detected low levels of gamma radiation in Manitoba near the end of last month,” Natasha said, her tone clipped and precise, her eyes locking onto his. “We think it’s him, but we’re headed up there to check.”

Tony’s brow furrowed, his fingers tapping lightly on the bench as he processed. “What was the date?”

“December 28th,” Natasha replied, unflinching.

Tony’s eyes narrowed, a faint crease forming between his brows. “That’s two days after I sent the invites out.”

Natasha nodded, her mind already racing ahead. “We’re also going to check out a S.H.I.E.L.D. blacksite in the area. If HYDRA’s following him, they’ll use S.H.I.E.L.D. as a cover.”

Wendy opened her mouth as if to interject, then closed it. Tony caught it, too.

“What’s up?” he asked. “What’ve you got?”

“I just…” Wendy hesitated, her fingers tightening slightly on the edge of the bench, knuckles whitening. “Doctor Steger, Von Strucker, and Damian Maliak.”

Tony’s brow furrowed deeper, confusion flickering across his face. “Who?”

Natasha’s posture shifted, her arms uncrossing as she leaned forward slightly, her voice low but clear. “Clarify, please.”

“Doctor Steger was a professor at the Academy. He often spoke about the particle infusion chamber—said it was one of the possible placements for us upon graduation. He would be fascinated with the idea of harnessing the Hulk, but I’m not sure he ever held a cover within S.H.I.E.L.D.—I only know him as a teacher. Werner Von Strucker’s father was placed as the head of the chamber project when he graduated from the Academy in the 80s. He’s considered one of the heads of HYDRA. I know he works on projects regarding powered people. And Damian Maliak was just an asshole biochemist who was fascinated by the Hulk and nuclear energy. I don’t remember where he got placed when he graduated, but he left the Academy months after the incident in Harlem.”

Natasha sucked in a sharp breath, the name striking like a jolt of electricity, drawing both Tony’s and Wendy’s attention. “Baron Von Strucker is a S.H.I.E.L.D. consultant,” she said. 

Tony’s expression shifted—shock, then a flash of anger tightening his jaw. “JARVIS, rundown on Von Strucker,” he instructed, spinning to face another worktop, his movements sharp, almost restless. Above it, a holo-display flickered to life, JARVIS projecting an image of Wolfgang von Strucker—severe features, buzzed silver hair, a calculated gaze that seemed to pierce through the screen. Rolling data streamed alongside: dates, titles, affiliations, a clinical summary of a man Natasha had never actually met but had seen in files.

“According to S.H.I.E.L.D. databases,” JARVIS began, his voice crisp and measured, “Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker was recruited in the early 1980s, during a period of heightened tensions surrounding the Cold War efforts, in which they sought experts to counter Soviet advances in unconventional weaponry and energy research. His public resume—consulting for NATO, DARPA, and private firms such as Roxxon—made him a prime candidate. He entered S.H.I.E.L.D. as a civilian contractor in 1983, working on theoretical energy containment systems— ostensibly to harness fusion or antimatter for defense applications.”

Natasha’s mind churned, parsing the information even as it landed. She considered herself sharp, capable of grasping complex systems with enough time—codes, patterns, even the edges of Tony’s tech talk. But particle physics? Fusion containment? That was a language she could only skim, and time was a luxury they didn’t have.

“Translation, please,” she said, her tone dry but urgent, cutting through JARVIS’s clinical recitation.

Tony glanced over, a faint smirk tugging at his lips despite the tension, as he leaned against the bench, one hand gesturing vaguely. “Think of it like… a really fancy battery project,” he said, simplifying without condescension. “Strucker was supposedly working on ways to trap crazy amounts of energy—think nuclear, but cleaner, for shields or weapons. Fusion’s like squishing atoms to make a sun; antimatter’s the opposite, annihilating stuff for a big boom. S.H.I.E.L.D. thought he was building tech to keep that contained, safe. Defense, not offense.”

Then, he scoffed, looking back at the projection. “Ostensibly.”

“Except maybe it wasn’t,” Natasha said, her voice low, her eyes narrowing as she stared at Strucker’s image, its cold formality mocking them. The lab’s hum felt louder now, the air thick with the scent of solder and ozone, the faint whir of DUM-E’s claw in the background as he idly spun a wrench on the retro projector nearby. The stick figure on the ceiling danced on, oblivious.

Ostensibly. A cover story, polished over decades. She pictured Strucker in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s halls—charming, untouchable, his aristocratic accent smoothing over questions while he fed HYDRA secrets. Her fingers twitched, itching to dig into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s servers herself, to tear apart his lies.

“Strucker is reported to have interfaced with external partners—universities, tech firms, even military contractors.”

A new panel flared to life on the holo-display, bold text reading “BIO-TECH FORCE ENHANCEMENT PROJECT,” an image of General Thaddeus Ross glaring beneath it—stern, grizzled, the discernible mustache, his uniform crisp even in the grainy file photo.

Tony’s fingers froze mid-tap on the bench, his rhythm faltering as he stared at the panel. “Does this mean Ross is also HYDRA?” he asked, his voice tight, the question half-rhetorical as his tapping picked up pace, a nervous tic betraying his unease.

Natasha’s lips pressed into a thin line, her mind already dissecting the connection. “Mm, I doubt it,” she hummed, her tone measured but edged with disdain. “It’s more likely he’s just bigoted and self-interested. But he would be a prime candidate for HYDRA to work with in order to steer the narrative.” She leaned closer to the display, her eyes scanning Ross’s file—dates, ops, his relentless hunt for Bruce. A pawn, not a player , she thought, but dangerous all the same .

“The Echidna Project,” Wendy blurted out, pointing to the word in another panel. “That’s what I was a part of. At the Jack-Box.”

Tony spun to face her, his hands stilling as he processed her words. 

“You’re sure?” His words were quiet, urgent, his gaze locking onto hers with a zeal that seemed to anchor her.

She nodded, her face open, unguarded. “When they recorded my sessions with the sceptre, I was required to state my name and status. Maria Stark. Echidna patient. ” Her voice trembled slightly, but her posture held firm, the oversized hoodie swallowing her frame but not her resolve.

Tony pivoted toward Natasha, his expression darkening, a storm brewing behind his eyes. “That confirms that he and August List are working together,” he said

Natasha nodded, but her eyes remained locked on Wendy. “But you never saw Strucker?”

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry, I have to ask,” Tony’s voice cut through the air with speed, his hands supporting his weight on the table as he leaned forward, looking intensely at Wendy. “ What is a particle infusion chamber?”

Wendy gulped. “HYDRA’s response to the super soldier serum. It was a project started in the ‘80s. The idea was to infuse the properties of certain… materials… into a human. To turn them into the most powerful person on Earth. It was codenamed… the Destroyer of Worlds.”

Warning sirens rang in Natasha’s head, screaming DANGER! —a visceral forecast that sent her pulse racing. She exchanged a glance with Tony. His face had gone pale, his eyes narrowing as the weight of the codename settled over him like a shroud. The lab’s hum faded into the background; the air tasted stale with dread.

“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The phrase echoed Oppenheimer, annihilation, an ambition too vast for even S.H.I.E.L.D.’s blind trust to ignore.

“Destroyer of Worlds,” Tony echoed, his voice barely above a whisper, the words thick. “Sounds swell.”

Natasha’s chest tightened, her mind grappling with the scale of it—HYDRA’s reach, Strucker’s experiments, all occurring under their noses. A sense of claustrophobia pressed against her, the holo-display’s glow casting stark light on their faces. She forced her breathing to regulate, her gaze shifting to the Manitoba map still pinned on another projection, a faint green dot marking the gamma spike. They couldn’t unravel HYDRA’s web tonight, not with dawn approaching and Bruce’s trail growing colder.

“This isn’t a regime to dismantle overnight,” she said. She stepped closer to the workbench, her fingers brushing the edge of the retro projector, its gears still warm from use. “Right now, we focus on Manitoba. Find Banner, confirm he’s safe—or not. That blacksite’s our best shot.” 

“Um,” Wendy’s quiet voice interjected, hesitant but clear, slicing through Natasha’s focus. “Is that the best idea?”

Natasha’s immediate instinct was to narrow her eyes and question the interruption, her reflexes primed for a challenge. But she caught herself, registering the openness in Wendy’s posture—the way her shoulders weren’t hunched, her eyes weren’t darting away. This was the most unguarded the girl had been since the REID room yesterday, since the 93rd floor’s chaos, and her fearful whispers. Natasha forced her expression to soften, keeping it impassive but not cold.

“What’re you thinking?” she asked instead, her words steady, inviting, threading patience through her words.

Wendy’s eyes darted to Tony, her fingers twitching against the bench, a nervous tic belying her boldness. “You all said earlier you were trying to avoid a firefight with S.H.I.E.L.D.,” she said, gaining strength as she spoke. “I don’t really know the specifics of how your team works, but wouldn’t a billionaire, a super soldier, and two spies storming a base controlled by the organization that’s supposed to control them set off alarm bells?”

Natasha bit her lip, the girl’s words landing like a well-aimed dart, piercing the plan’s weak point she’d been too focused to question. 

Wendy was right. A direct assault, even covert, risked S.H.I.E.L.D.’s attention, and if HYDRA’s tendrils were embedded as deeply as Wendy’s intel suggested, they’d be painting targets on their backs. Manitoba’s blacksite wasn’t just a lead; it was a trap waiting to spring, and they’d been barreling toward it.

Tony’s brow lifted, a flicker of surprise crossing his face as he glanced at Wendy, then Natasha. “Kid’s got a point,” he said, his voice carrying an air of respect. He pushed off the table, beginning to pace, his hands gesturing as his mind kicked into gear. “S.H.I.E.L.D.’s got eyes everywhere—cameras, trackers, probably a dozen analysts who’d love to report a rogue op. Fury already called Rogers after we stormed Brooklyn. And if HYDRA’s piggybacking their systems…” He trailed off, his eyes narrowing, already dissecting alternatives.

Natasha exhaled, her gaze flicking to the Manitoba map, the green dot mocking their haste. 

“We need to rethink this,” she said, her voice calm but decisive. “Storming in is too loud—S.H.I.E.L.D. would know, and HYDRA’d be waiting.” She turned to Tony, her posture shifting to command. “Call Steve and Clint. Get them here. We’re not moving on Banner until we’ve got a plan that keeps us invisible.”

Tony nodded, his fingers already tapping the air, summoning JARVIS. “JARVIS, ping Rogers and Barton. Tell ‘em to haul ass to the lab—team meeting, now.” His tone was brisk, but his glance at Wendy held a flicker of pride, quickly masked as he busied himself with the holo-display.

“Message sent, sir,” JARVIS replied, his voice a smooth counterpoint to the lab’s restless energy. “Captain Rogers and Agent Barton will arrive in approximately four minutes.”

Wendy shifted on her stool, her hands clasping together, the oversized hoodie’s sleeves slipping down to cover her fingers. Her eyes darted between Natasha and Tony, uncertainty creeping in now that her suggestion had redirected their course. Natasha caught it, the girl’s vulnerability surfacing amidst her courage, and offered a small nod—not praise, but acknowledgment, enough to steady her.

Natasha moved to the holo-display, pulling up the Manitoba map again, her fingers tracing the blacksite’s coordinates. The lab’s air felt charged now, the scent of machine oil and solder grounding her as she recalibrated. 

“We go quiet,” she said, half to herself, half to the room. “No jets, no signatures. We slip into Churchill and check the clinic first. If HYDRA’s there, we’ll see their tracks before they see ours.”

Tony stopped pacing, leaning against a workbench cluttered with circuit boards and half-built gadgets, his eyes sharpening. “I can spoof S.H.I.E.L.D.’s trackers—route our signals through dummy servers, make it look like we’re still in New York. JARVIS can handle the encryption.” He glanced at Natasha, a spark of his usual bravado returning. “Gonna need some old-school spy tricks from you, though. You up for it?”

Natasha’s lips twitched, the ghost of a smirk. “Always.” She turned to Wendy, her voice softer but firm. “You did good, pointing that out. Stay sharp—we might need more of that head of yours.”

Wendy’s cheeks flushed faintly, but she nodded, her fingers tightening around the hoodie’s cuffs. The lab’s lights cast her shadow long across the floor, mingling with the flickering stick figure still dancing on the ceiling—a small, defiant creation holding its own against the weight of their task.

The elevator chimed faintly in the distance, signaling Steve and Clint’s arrival.

As Steve and Clint stepped off the elevator, their boots echoing against the polished floor, a thrum of tension filled the space around her. Natasha stood at the holo-display, the Manitoba map glowing faintly, Churchill’s green dot pulsing like a heartbeat. Tony leaned against a workbench, arms crossed, while Wendy remained perched on a stool, her hands buried in her hoodie sleeves. 

“We’re scrapping the direct approach,” Natasha began, her voice steady and commanding. “Storming the blacksite’s too loud—S.H.I.E.L.D. would clock us, and HYDRA likely’d be waiting. Wendy pointed it out: a billionaire, a super soldier, and two assassins who were on the news don’t exactly blend in.” She nodded slightly at Wendy, acknowledging her insight without fanfare. “We go quiet. No jets, no signatures. Slip into Churchill, check the clinic first. If Banner’s there, we extract him before anyone knows we’ve moved.”

Steve frowned, stepping closer to the map. “Quiet how? Manitoba’s remote, but S.H.I.E.L.D.’s got satellites, trackers—”

“I’ve got a friend in Winnipeg,” Clint interjected, leaning forward with a casual confidence. “Bush pilot, doesn’t ask questions if the cash is clean. He can fly us in close without flagging systems.” His tone was matter-of-fact, but his eyes glinted with the promise of a workable lead.

Tony’s head snapped up, a spark igniting behind his sharp gaze. “Now we’re talking backcountry espionage.” He pushed off the workbench, pacing a short arc. “I’ll take care of the trackers—route our comms through encrypted proxies, bounce signals off old Stark satellites. They’ll think we’re still in New York, sipping lattes.” His voice carried a half-joking lilt, but his mind was already churning through the tech.

Steve nodded, his practicality kicking in as he traced a route on the holo-display. “Churchill’s small, under a thousand people. We land outside town, hike in. The clinic’s our first stop, like Nat said. If Bruce is there, we get him out quietly.” He zoomed in on the rugged terrain near Hudson Bay, his jaw tightening as he calculated the logistics.

“I’ll handle IDs,” Natasha added. “Fake passports, civilian covers. We’re tourists, researchers, something that blends. No weapons, no gear that screams ‘Avengers.’” Her fingers brushed the projector’s edge, its warmth lingering from earlier use, as she mentally pieced together aliases and backstories.

Clint tapped the map, refining the approach. “Pilot drops us near the bay, we rent a truck into town. Low profile—no Quinjets. If HYDRA or S.H.I.E.L.D.’s watching the blacksite, they won’t expect us from the north.” His field experience sharpened the plan, grounding it in reality.

Tony grinned faintly, gesturing to a cluttered workbench. “I’ll rig up some burners—untraceable phones. JARVIS will have to stay offline until we’re clear. If we split, we use those.” His tech layered invisibility over their movements, a digital smokescreen.

“We’ll watch the blacksite from a distance,” Natasha reaffirmed, “but the clinic’s priority.”

The plan was coalescing—stealth over force, a backdoor into Manitoba. But a quiet tension lingered. Steve broke the silence, his voice steady yet thoughtful. “Have you thought about what will happen if he doesn’t want to come?”

The question settled over the room like a cold breeze, sharpening the air. It wasn’t accusatory—it was Steve, weighing the ethical edges of their mission, his respect for Bruce’s autonomy clear in his tone.

Natasha’s gaze shifted to him, then back to the map, her mind already turning over the possibility. 

“We can’t force him,” she said, her voice calm but grounded in realism. “If he’s hiding for a reason, we respect it. But we owe him the truth—about HYDRA, about what Wendy knows. He gets to decide with all the cards on the table.”

Tony’s fingers paused on the workbench, his jaw tightening slightly. “Bruce isn’t dumb. If we tell him HYDRA’s closing in, he’ll see the play. We just have to reach him before they do.” His words carried a flicker of optimism, though his eyes hinted at the stakes if they failed.

Clint crossed his arms, leaning back. “We lay it out—facts, risks, all of it. If he says no, we walk away. But we don’t leave him in the dark. HYDRA doesn’t care about his ‘no thanks’ sign.”

Natasha nodded, the weight of it settling. Bruce’s freedom mattered, but so did their loyalty. They’d find him, warn him, fight for him—whether he came back or not.

Steve’s expression softened, his resolve firm. “We’re not here to drag him back. We’re here to give him a choice—and make sure he’s not facing this alone.” He glanced at Wendy, then the team, his words a quiet anchor.

But then Steve paused, his gaze settling on the girl. “And what about Wendy?” His voice was steady, but the room stilled, the question hanging heavy.

Wendy didn’t shrink, but she didn’t volunteer either, her fingers tightening on her hoodie cuffs. Her shadow stretched across the floor, mingling with the stick figure dancing on the ceiling—a quiet defiance in the tension.

Tony stepped in first, his voice steady but edged with protectiveness. “She knows the project. She recognizes HYDRA’s language, patterns. If something’s off, she’ll see it faster than we will.” He glanced at Wendy, then back to Steve, his jaw set, daring a challenge.

Steve’s tone remained careful but firm. “She’s a kid.” His eyes flicked to both her and Clint, seeking backup.

“She’s not just a kid,” Natasha broke the quiet, her voice measured. It wasn’t a full endorsement, but it shifted the room’s balance, her gaze holding Steve’s in a silent acknowledgment of Wendy’s value—and the risk she carried.

Clint rubbed his jaw, uneasy. “Yeah, if HYDRA’s waiting, she’s also a target.” 

Tony’s voice dropped, his eyes locking on Wendy. “She already is.” The truth hung raw and heavy, stripping away pretense.

Wendy spoke then, her pitch soft but clear, cutting through the weight. “If I don’t go, and one of you gets hurt…” She paused, swallowing, her hands trembling slightly. “This is the first real opportunity I have to do the right thing. To fight under the right flag.” 

Her words lingered, quiet but piercing, a plea wrapped in resolve.

Steve exhaled, his shoulders loosening slightly, though his brow stayed furrowed. “We keep her out of the line of fire. She stays with Tony or Nat at all times.”

It was a condition, not a concession.

Natasha nodded, her voice calm but firm. “She’s an asset, not a liability. We use her mind, not her hands.” Her gaze shifted to Wendy, a silent promise of safety threading through her words.

Clint leaned back, arms crossing. “Fine. But if it goes sideways, we pull her out. No heroics.” 

His stern gaze bored into Wendy, who straightened under its weight. She nodded once.

Tony straightened, his hand brushing Wendy’s shoulder briefly—an unguarded gesture. 

“She’ll be fine. We’ll make sure of it.” His voice held steady, but his eyes betrayed a father’s fear beneath the bravado. He was settling into the role pretty quickly, but what else could have been expected of genius Tony Stark than for him to transcend expectation?

The team dispersed—Clint to confirm the pilot, Steve returning to his floor. Natasha lingered by the holo-display, the map of Manitoba glowing softly, its green dot a faint pulse in the quiet. Wendy’s words replayed in her mind: “fight under the right flag.” It wasn’t just a phrase—it was a choice, a fragile stand against the chaos of misplaced loyalties. Just over twenty-four hours ago, in the REID room, Wendy had warned them about saluting a false flag, her voice sharp with the weight of the life she’d lived within HYDRA. Now, that same voice carried a tentative hope, a belief that this cause, this team, was worth her courage.

Natasha knew banners—had saluted too many, some stained with blood she couldn’t wash away. Red Room. KGB. S.H.I.E.L.D. Each had demanded loyalty, each had crumbled in its way. But this one felt different. Not a symbol carved in stone or stitched in fabric, but a living thing, forged in the trust between them—Steve’s resolve, Tony’s defiance, Clint’s pragmatism, Wendy’s quiet fire. They were rallying for Bruce, for each other. A cause not shouted from rooftops, but whispered in the cracks, strong because it was theirs.

Her breath steadied, her pulse calm. 

Their departure loomed, just 13 hours away. The bitter Canadian winter awaited. They’d slip through HYDRA’s shadow, find their friend, and hold fast to the fragile strength they’d built. It wasn’t perfect, but they’d figure it out.

And then her stomach growled.

Chapter Text

Wendy’s fingers twisted her hoodie’s drawstring, the fabric soft but grounding, tethering her to the workbench where schematics lay scattered like puzzle pieces. Tony leaned nearby, his band tee smudged with grease, muttering to himself about satellite pings. Natasha stood by the display, her red hair catching the light, her posture still but alert, like she could move in any direction at once.

A low growl broke the quiet—not mechanical, not tech, but… human. Wendy’s eyes flicked to Natasha, who pressed a hand to her stomach, her lips twitching into a faint grimace.

“Alright,” Natasha said, her voice dry but casual, glancing between Wendy and Tony. “Either of you hungry, or am I the only one starving here?”

Tony’s head snapped up, a grin flashing. “Starving? Romanoff, I’ve got a protein bar empire in drawer three on the back wall. Pick your poison—peanut butter, birthday cake, cranberry…” He gestured vaguely at a cluttered workbench, but his questioning eyes darted to Wendy.

Wendy blinked, her mind snagging on the question. Was she hungry? Her stomach felt… nothing. Quiet, like usual. She ate yesterday in the MedLab—chicken, and that gross congealed cheesy macaroni, the memory of the texture triggering an unbidden shudder. She had some tea on the 93rd floor before everything fell apart. Today in the lab, water from a bottle Tony had set next to her, markers and schematics drowning out everything else. No hunger, no ache, just… there.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice automatic. She tugged her hoodie sleeves down, covering her knuckles, the fabric a shield against Natasha’s steady gaze.

Natasha paused, her eyes narrowing slightly. “When’s the last time you ate?” she asked, her tone casual but sharp, like a blade hidden in silk.

“Yesterday,” she said, the word slipping out before she could weigh it.

The lab went deathly still. The holo-display’s hum seemed to fade, the air thickening with a tension Wendy didn’t understand. Tony’s playful grin vanished, his posture stiffening as he turned fully to face her, his eyes wide, intense.

“Yesterday?” he repeated, his voice low, edged with something—anger? Worry? It pressed against her, heavy, like she’d broken a rule she didn’t know existed. His hands froze on the workbench, knuckles whitening.

Wendy’s fingers tightened on her drawstring, her chest prickling with heat. “I… I wasn’t hungry,” she said, the words feeling wrong, too thin. Her stomach didn’t growl, didn’t hurt. Was it supposed to? She knew it had growled yesterday, but it was probably because it had been a couple of days since her last meal. She always prioritized hydration.

It was a pattern that occurred often in her life. She’d have moments of intense hunger, especially after expending energy. But there had also been times in her life when food was not readily available. Her body didn’t have a set pattern anymore, not after being at the Jack-Box. They fed her most of the time, but she didn’t know when or how often.

If she were being honest, she probably should be hungry, given whatever thing happened to her on the 93rd floor. She was shaky and tired afterward, but her stomach never complained. 

To be fair, her brain was doing its very best to pretend that never happened.

She glanced at Natasha, then back to Tony, his stare pinning her in place. She was starting to think she’d failed a test.

Natasha’s expression didn’t change, but her voice softened, just a fraction. “That’s over twenty-four hours, Wendy. You can’t just… skip meals like that.”

Tony exhaled sharply, jerkily running a hand through his hair. “Kid, you’re not a rock. You need food to, y’know, live.” His tone was light, forced, but his eyes were dark, searching her face like he was looking for something broken. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Wendy’s throat tightened, her mind blanking. Say something? About what? She hadn’t felt anything. 

“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” she mumbled, her voice cracking. Her fingers twisted harder, the drawstring biting into her skin. Tony’s unfounded worry confused her—it was too loud, too fast, like a signal she couldn’t decode.

He stared at her, his jaw working, then turned to Natasha, his voice dropping. “We dropped the ball. Big time.” It wasn’t a joke, not like his usual quips. It was heavy, raw, like he’d let her down. He hadn’t.

Natasha nodded, her gaze flicking to Wendy, steady but not accusing. She straightened. “We’ll fix it now. I’ll order some takeout.”

Tony snapped his fingers, a spark igniting in his eyes. “You know what? Screw takeout. We’re doing this right—home-cooked, real food. Italian. My Nonna’s recipe, straight from the old country.” He grinned, but it was softer, aimed at Wendy like an offering. “You ever had lasagna? The kind that makes you forget the world’s falling apart?”

Wendy blinked. “I… yes?” she said, unsure. She’d definitely had lasagna before, but it didn’t exactly change her outlook on life. Her stomach stayed silent, but Tony’s energy pulled her along, like a current she didn’t want to fight.

Natasha raised an eyebrow, her lips twitching. 

“You? Cooking? I’ve seen you burn toast, Stark.” Her skepticism was sharp, playful, but she was already moving toward the door, like she’d signed on despite herself.

“Ye of little faith!” Tony shot back, pointing at her. “I’m an Italian culinary genius. You’ll be begging for seconds.” He turned to Wendy, his grin widening. “C’mon, kid. You’re on Team Stark—let’s raid for supplies.”

Wendy slid off the stool, her boots scuffing the floor, her hoodie a familiar weight as she followed. The lab’s chaos faded behind them, the stick figure on the ceiling a fleeting memory as they stepped into the elevator. Natasha leaned against the wall, her eyes half-lidded but alert, while Tony rattled off ingredients—“tomatoes, mozzarella, fresh basil, none of that canned nonsense”—his voice filling the space.

The elevator stopped at Steve’s floor first, apparently floor 83, the door opening to a quiet hallway. Tony strode out, Wendy trailing, Natasha bringing up the rear. Steve’s kitchen was sparse but neat and rife with fresh vegetables.

“Hold this,” Tony instructed, handing her a couple of tomatoes, an onion, and a head of garlic.

“Is this stealing?” Wendy asked, the question slipping out before she could stop it. Steve wouldn’t mind, would he? But it felt wrong, taking something that wasn't hers. 

At least, it felt more wrong than when she was trying to get to the tower. That was a matter of survival. This seemed… invasive.

Tony paused, mid-rummage through a drawer. “Stealing? Nah, he lives in my tower; therefore, it's shared custody of groceries if you don’t put your name on it first. Rogers’ll eat the lasagna when it’s done, so it’s a fair trade.” His grin was mischievous, but he glanced at her, checking, like he wanted to be sure she was okay.

Natasha snorted, leaning against the counter. “He probably didn’t anticipate having to label his produce on his floor .” Her tone was dry, but her eyes were warm, including Wendy in the banter.

Wendy nodded, clutching the produce. She didn’t say anything, but something about the easy rhythm between them—the teasing, the shared understanding—felt like a language she almost recognized.

Next was Clint’s floor, floor 84, where Tony liberated a block of mozzarella from the fridge—“Barton’s pizza obsession pays off,” he muttered—and Natasha grabbed a dusty box of lasagna noodles from a cupboard. Wendy held the cheese, its plastic wrap slick under her fingers, watching while Tony debated boxed pasta with Natasha— “We’re making it from scratch only, Romanoff, don’t insult me.” —Natasha rolled her eyes. Still, she returned the pasta to its place, shooting Wendy a smirk.

The common room kitchen was last, the windows framing New York’s skyline, all sharp lights against the dusk. Wendy set her haul on the counter—tomatoes, garlic, onion, cheese—the items neat in a row, her fingers lingering on the smooth texture of the tomatoes.

As Tony arranged various cooking tools on the countertop, the elevator dinged again, and Pepper stepped out. 

“There better be a reason for this,” Pepper sighed, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor. In her hands was a blooming basil plant; the sharp, green scent stung her nose pleasantly. Tucked inside the plant was a piece of paper.

Natasha threw a flat look Tony’s way. “When did you tell her to bring a plant?”

Tony sniffed. “JARVIS knows if I’m making Italian, I’m only using fresh ingredients.” His deft fingers wrenched the page out of the plant, unfolding it with ease and setting it on the counter. It was a recipe.

Tony took charge, tying a black apron over his shirt with a flourish. “Alright, team, listen up. Lasagna’s an art—“ layers, balance, love ,” that’s what my Nonna used to say. I’m the maestro, you’re my sous-chefs.” 

He pointed at Wendy. “You’re on cheese duty—grate that mozzarella, nice and even.” To Natasha: “You’re sauce. Don’t mess it up.”

Natasha crossed her arms, her skepticism plain. “I’ve defused bombs, Stark. I think I can handle sauce. But if this tastes like ketchup, I’m blaming you.” Her lips twitched, betraying amusement as she grabbed the tomatoes and the recipe page.

Wendy hesitated, the cheese block heavy in her hands. Grate? She’d seen it done before—somewhere, maybe—but how much force should she apply? How much did they need? 

Tony noticed, stepping over to hand her a box grater, his voice softer. “Like this, kid. Slow, steady, don’t shred your fingers.” He mimed the motion, exaggerated, making her lips twitch despite herself.

She started grating, the cheese crumbling into soft piles, the rhythm oddly soothing. Her eyes flicked to Tony, who was chopping the onion and basil with surprising precision, his knife flashing under the lights. Natasha stirred the sauce, her movements efficient but cautious, as if she were waiting for it to explode. The kitchen filled with smells—tomatoes simmering, the sharp scent of basil and garlic, and she could practically taste the cheese before her. The onion made her eyes water. Wendy’s stomach stayed quiet, but the scents pressed against her senses with a feeling similar to intrigue.

Tony moved to a skillet, pulling a sleeve of ground pork from the fridge. 

“Now, the heart of the lasagna,” he said, his tone almost reverent as he set the pan on the stove, a sizzle starting as he drizzled oil. “The meat’s gotta be perfect—rich, not greasy.” He glanced at Wendy, then Natasha. “C’mere, both of you. This is a team effort.”

Wendy set the grater down, stepping closer, the cheese’s earthy smell clinging to her fingers. Natasha leaned in, her skepticism still sharp, arms crossed loosely. Tony broke the pork into the pan, the hiss loud, the scent of searing meat rising warm and heavy, making Wendy’s nose twitch. She watched the pink-brown clumps shift, her hands hovering, unsure.

“Break it up with the spoon,” Tony instructed, handing Wendy a wooden one. Its handle was smooth but warm from his grip. “Keep it moving. And listen—don’t cook the meat for too long or it will dry out. Short bursts in a hot pan, let it brown, not burn.” His voice was steady, like he was explaining a circuit, not food.

Wendy stirred, the pork crumbling under the spoon. The motion was awkward at first, but she eventually settled into a pattern. The pan’s heat warmed her face, the sizzle a quick rhythm against the bubbling of the sauce. 

Tony nodded, approving, then nudged Natasha. “You’re up—add the onions and garlic, but don’t drown it. Subtle, Romanoff, subtle.”

Natasha snorted, mincing garlic with a knife she’d grabbed from the block, her cuts precise but cautious. 

“Subtle’s not your style, Stark,” she said, tossing the garlic in, followed by the onions Tony chopped. The scent flared—sharp, pungent—mixing with the meat, making Wendy’s eyes sting slightly. She blinked hard, focusing on the spoon, the pork’s texture shifting from soft to crisp.

Tony hovered, checking the pan. “Good, good—see that color? That’s what we want. Not gray, not charcoal.” He clapped Wendy’s shoulder lightly, the touch quick but warm. “You’re a natural, kid.” His grin was back, softer, like he meant it.

He moved back to the island, hands quickly working some kind of silver crank that he threaded his prepared pasta dough through. It flattened the dough into long strips, which he then cut into rectangles.

Natasha stirred the sauce nearby, her eyebrow lifting as she glanced at the meat. “Not bad for a guy who lives on pizza,” she said, her tone teasing but less guarded, the mix of scents coming together softening her doubt.

The meat finished. Tony drained it on a plate, the golden-brown crumbles steaming faintly. 

“Perfect,” he declared, sliding it next to the sauce. “Now we build the masterpiece.”

Tony hummed something off-key, an old song she didn’t know, his hands moving from basil to his homemade noodles, layering them in a dish with a focus she’d only seen in the lab. They were shoulder to shoulder at the counter, Natasha behind them at the stove, and Pepper on a laptop at the far end of the island.

“Nonna Stark would be proud,” he said, likely to himself, but his glance at Wendy was warm, like he was sharing a secret. “She’d say food’s how you keep people together. Family, y’know?”

Wendy nodded, unsure what to say. Family . The word felt big and slippery, like the cheese slipping through her fingers. The kitchen’s warmth wrapped around her, softer than the lab’s hum. It didn’t fully quiet the loops in her mind, but the repetitive motions of drizzling cheese between layers of pasta, sauce, and meat, and Tony’s quiet comments kept her in the here and now.

Natasha tasted the sauce, her eyebrow lifting. “Not bad, Stark. I’m almost impressed.” Her tone was teasing, but she didn’t hide her surprise, stirring with a little more confidence.

“Almost?” Tony scoffed, spreading cheese over noodles. “You’ll be singing my praises by the end, Romanoff. Just wait.” He winked at Wendy, who ducked her head, her cheeks as warm as the sudden feeling in her chest. But she couldn’t keep the little smile from creeping onto her face.

The lasagna took shape—layers of sauce, noodles, meat, cheese—Tony’s hands guiding, Natasha’s steady, Wendy’s careful. The sun fully sank behind the sprawling skyscrapers. She just noticed that the curtains had been pulled back. Wendy’s fingers smelled of mozzarella, her hoodie speckled with flour, and for a moment, the world felt… smaller. 

Tony slid the dish into the oven with a flourish, setting a timer.

“Forty-five minutes to perfection,” he declared, wiping his hands on his shirt. 

Wendy stood by the counter, her fingers tracing the edge of her hoodie sleeve, the flour’s grit a faint texture under her nails. The scents—basil, garlic, mozzarella—hung heavy, vivid, pressing against her senses. There was a hint of hunger stirring in her stomach just from the smells.

Pepper closed her laptop with a soft click, sliding it aside to lean on the island, her eyes scanning the group. 

“Well, that was… surprisingly organized,” she said, her tone warm but teasing, a smile tugging at her lips. “I half-expected a fire alarm. I’m impressed.”

Tony clutched his chest, mock-pain on his face. 

“Pep, you wound me. I’m a culinary savant. This lasagna’s gonna be a masterpiece—Michelin-star worthy.” He dropped into a stool, spinning it slightly, his grin wide, but his eyes flicking to Wendy, like he was still checking on her.

Is that what dads do?

Natasha leaned against the counter, arms crossed, her smirk sharp. “Michelin’s not giving stars for enthusiasm, Stark. Let’s see if it’s edible first.” Her voice was dry, but she stayed close, her posture relaxed. The knife she had used for garlic was now clean and back in its block.

Wendy shifted on her feet, her boots scuffing softly on the floor, the stool’s height tempting, but she just knew she’d end up swinging her legs annoyingly. She stayed standing, her hands slipping into the hoodie pocket, fingers finding the drawstring’s frayed end. The conversation felt like a current—fast, warm, but hard to keep up with. They weren’t speaking quickly, but the conversation felt established in a way that seemed inapplicable to her. The barrier to entry was too high. She blinked, refocusing on Pepper’s smile, trying to anchor herself.

“So, Wendy,” Pepper said, her voice gentle, pulling Wendy’s gaze. “Ever helped cook something like this before? Or is Tony your first kitchen drill sergeant?” Her tone was light and inviting, but Wendy felt the demand of being seen, her chest tightening slightly.

Wendy’s fingers twisted the drawstring, her eyes dropping to the counter’s gleam. 

“Not… really,” she said, her voice small but clear. “Food was just… there. Before.” Before, at the Academy, there were trays of bland protein, no basil, and no warmth. She didn’t say it, but the word hung in her pause, heavy. “This is… different.”

Tony’s grin softened, his spinning stool slowing. “Different’s good, kid. Nonna’d say the kitchen’s where you figure out who you are. Or at least who’s hogging the cheese.” He nudged the empty mozzarella wrapper toward her, his tease gentle, like he was testing her reaction.

Wendy’s lips twitched. The motions of cooking—grating the cheese, stirring the pork, putting it all together—that was real. Different, but tangible. Easier than figuring out who you are. Her eyes flicked to the oven, the glass dark, no clues about the lasagna inside. Would it taste good? Would she know if it did?

Tony’s eyes darted to Wendy again, softer. “You’re doing alright, kid, yeah? Not too overwhelmed by my culinary prowess?”

Wendy blinked, the question catching her off guard. Her fingers stilled on the drawstring, her mind scrambling. The kitchen was warm, and the smell was strong—basil, meat, and something sweet from Pepper’s perfume. Overwhelmed? Maybe—the voices, the lights, the way they looked at her, like she was part of this. 

She wanted to be part of this.

“I’m okay,” she said. “It’s a lot. But it’s good.” She didn’t know if that was right, but it was true.

Pepper’s smile held, her head tilting slightly. “A lot’s okay,” she said, her tone steady, like she meant it. “You’re here, that’s what counts. The rest we figure out.”

Natasha nodded, almost imperceptible, her eyes on Wendy for a beat before shifting to Tony. “She’s tougher than she looks, Stark. She’ll probably end up a better cook than you.” Her tone was teasing, but there was a subtle nod of respect aimed at Wendy.

Tony leaned back, his stool creaking. “Tougher than me, maybe. I flinched when you almost drowned the sauce in garlic.” He grinned, dodging Natasha’s mock-glare, then turned to Wendy. “But seriously, kid, you’re killin’ it. Grating, stirring—next stop, Iron Chef.”

Wendy’s cheeks warmed, her fingers tightening in her pocket. She didn’t know what to say, so she nodded, her eyes flicking to the oven again, the timer’s numbers glowing red, ticking down. 

Time seemed to move faster than she could keep up with, watching the conversation around her flow.

“Captain Rogers and Agent Barton are en route to the common floor. ETA: forty seconds.”

Tony looked up. “Great timing, JARVIS.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The elevator doors swished open precisely on cue. Steve stepped out, and her gaze immediately stuck to the brace on his wrist. Clint followed behind him, a paper coffee cup in hand like it was part of his uniform.

“Well,” Clint said, eyeing the group within the kitchen, “something smells good.”

“You’re nearly two hours late,” Tony called, swivelling on his stool to face the elevator.

“Technically, we were never invited,” Steve said as he stepped fully inside. “JARVIS just let us know dinner was happening on this floor.”

Tony raised a hand. “That’s an invitation, freeloader.”

Clint sipped his coffee. “Big talk, considering you invited us to live here in the first place.”

“Yeah, but I assumed you’d all pull your weight,” Tony said. “Cooking, cleaning, light vacuuming—maybe a chore wheel, if we’re feeling ambitious.”

Steve arched a brow. “You assumed that?”

Tony pointed toward Wendy. “Kid’s been grating cheese and searing pork like a pro all evening. What’ve you two contributed lately?”

“I did a perimeter check,” Clint offered. “Which, by the way, included relocating a very fat, very angry raccoon from the bike rack.”

“Impressive,” Pepper deadpanned. “Truly, you’ve earned your dinner.”

Steve glanced toward the stove. “And here I thought moving in meant we got to eat Tower food without being on the payroll.”

Tony sniffed, mock-offended. “You think I do this for free?”

“Joke’s on you,” Clint added. “We thought you were the freeloader.”

Wendy smothered a laugh by clearing her throat and proceeded to promptly ignore the looks sent her way.

Tony narrowed his eyes, gesturing vaguely to the ceiling. “JARVIS, make a note. Start charging rent per sarcastic comment.”

“Logged, sir,” JARVIS replied smoothly.

Tony, seemingly the master of emotional dodgeball, clapped his hands. “Okay! Enough sentiment. Let’s eat like grown-ups—wait. Shit. Hold on.” He looked around. “It’s just occurred to me—”

“There’s no dining table,” Pepper said, already seeing where he was going.

“There’s no dining table on this floor,” he repeated, scandalized.

A beat of silence, then Clint deadpanned, “Seems like an oversight.”

Natasha didn’t miss a beat. “Well, did we really think we’d be having team dinners?”

What a fucking mess, she thought, but couldn’t stop the corner of her lips from quirking up.

They scavenged quickly. Steve discovered floor cushions in a closet down the hall, and they made a haphazard circle on the rug between the couches. Wendy sat cross-legged, her plate balanced in her lap, while Tony muttered something about turning the floor into a medieval banquet hall next time.

Natasha twirled her fork like a weapon. “Moment of truth, Stark.”

He arched a brow. “Ready to be humbled?”

They all took bites. Wendy waited. She watched Pepper’s face soften, Natasha’s expression shift from guarded to pleased. Tony chewed with exaggerated satisfaction. Then they all looked at her.

She then regretted watching their reactions first. So she scooped up a corner, blew on it like Tony had, and took a bite.

The warmth hit first—actual warmth, not just temperature. Then, the texture: chewy, gooey, soft in the center, crisp on the edges.  It wasn’t just food. It was… hers. Given, not taken. Made, not issued. She felt her stomach rumble, and suddenly the hunger she’d been missing hit hard.

“It’s good,” she said, because it was. Her fork moved again, this time without prompting.

And just like that, it felt… normal. Just people. Sitting. Eating.

“So,” Steve said after a few bites, “we should probably talk about Manitoba.”

Pepper looked up, a note of worry tightening the corners of her mouth. “What’s in Manitoba?”

“Dr. Banner, theoretically,” Natasha confirmed. “It’ll be quick. In and out, if all goes right. No more than three days.”

Tony swallowed a mouthful, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and added, “We have to get to Bruce before HYDRA, if they haven’t already. If we give him too much time, he’ll vanish into the woods again.”

Pepper’s gaze drifted to Wendy, who was quietly chewing another bite, slower this time.

“So, I assume Wendy will be staying here.”

Tony froze mid-bite, his fork suspended in midair. Across from him, Natasha didn’t look up. Steve’s jaw worked, his eyes on his plate. Clint took a long sip from his cup, as if he hadn’t heard the question at all.

Personally, Wendy felt that the lack of response was enough of an answer.

“I—” Tony started, then stopped. He set his plate down on the floor beside him with exaggerated care. “Look, I know how it sounds. But she’s not being dragged into anything. She wants to help.”

Pepper arched a brow. “She’s fourteen.”

“Fifteen,” Wendy said quietly, correcting her, which somehow made it worse.

Pepper blinked. “Fourteen. That makes it completely fine, then.”

Tony scrubbed a hand down his face. “Pepper—”

“She’s been out for barely twenty-four hours, Tony, just over a day. And you’re already—what? Taking her into the field?”

“It’s not the field like that,” Natasha said, finally cutting in. “She won’t be alone. And we’re not walking into a firefight. It’s recon. Extraction, if Bruce agrees. Quiet.”

“Quick, if we’re lucky,” Steve added. “And she’s the one who caught the risk with our first plan. We didn’t see it. She did.”

“She barely speaks ,” Pepper said, her voice tightening.

“She observes,” Natasha replied. “And she doesn’t panic.”

Well…

Wendy would disagree with that, but it probably wasn’t the time. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t look away either. She didn’t flinch. 

“She’s not a soldier,” Pepper said, softer now. “She shouldn’t have to be.”

“She’s not,” Tony agreed. “She’s just… capable. And we trust her. That doesn’t mean we’re throwing her into danger. It means we’re not pretending she doesn’t have value until she’s older.”

Pepper’s lips pressed together, but she didn’t argue further. Not yet.

“I love it when a mission plan starts with if we’re lucky ,” Clint muttered into his fork.

“Clint,” Natasha murmured, kicking his leg with her foot.

The conversation continued. They tossed ideas around. Joked. Circled back to strategy, then veered off again when Clint told a truly awful story about a mission in Prague involving a broken grappling hook, a sewer tunnel, and a goat. Wendy was still stuck on where the goat was relevant. 

It seemed like that’s what the man did, though. Distracted. Exaggerated. Joked. It was a stark contrast to the impassive and steady archer she met the day before.

The story about the goat was mercifully interrupted when the conversation drifted back to something more practical.

“Speaking of logistics,” Pepper said, her voice shifting into business mode, “I ordered some basics for Wendy this morning. Clothes, essentials. They should be here soon.”

Tony blinked, mid-chew. “Wait—what?”

Pepper gave him a look.

“Oh,” he said, dragging the word out like it had personally betrayed him. “Right. Right. Because she… clothes. Of course.”

Clint snorted softly. “Gotta say, Stark, you’re not winning any parent-of-the-year awards yet.” His grin was teasing, but his glance at Wendy was kind, like he was including her in the joke.

Before Tony could come up with a defensive quip—or lie about having a plan all along—the elevator dinged.

The doors swished open, and Happy Hogan stepped out with both arms full of bags. His expression was halfway between exasperated and resigned.

“So what? I’m a delivery service now?” he asked flatly, stepping forward.

“Technically,” Tony said, standing to take one of the bags, “you’re Fore-Head of Security.”

“And this is a high-value asset,” Clint added, gesturing grandly to the nearest plastic shopping bag.

“Funny,” Happy said. “Nobody told me babysitting came with mall runs.”

“Babysitting?” Tony echoed, scandalized. “She’s probably more emotionally mature than I am.”

Pepper didn’t miss a beat. “It’s a low bar.”

Happy gave a grunt of agreement and handed off the rest of the bags to Pepper. “If anything explodes up here, I’m not filling out the paperwork.”

“You say that like it hasn’t already happened this week,” Natasha murmured.

“Has it happened this week?” Wendy found herself asking, curiosity getting the better of her.

Natasha just smirked and winked.

She watched them all volley back and forth. It didn’t feel like being ignored. It felt like inclusion . Like orbiting something without being shut out of it. The moon around the Earth. 

The bags that Pepper set beside her were white and light brown, one light pink and soft-looking, not a sterile issued duffel. And inside, she saw the corner of a hoodie. Not tactical. Just comfortable.

“If you boys are done,” Natasha interrupted the light-hearted bickering occurring, “I’m going to bring Wendy to my floor to get some extra clothes.” She then faced Pepper. “I’m sure you covered the basics pretty well, but it’s going to be below zero in Manitoba. She’ll need something more sturdy.”

Pepper nodded. “There are thermals in there, you’ll want to double-check. I didn’t order anything with a… mission in mind.”

“I will,” Natasha said. Her voice didn’t shift. It just… decided.

Wendy looked back at the bags again. They didn’t all match—one was soft and matte, like the kind used in stores that sold bathrobes and candles. Another was square and sporty. The third had delicate tissue paper sticking out from the top, like a forgotten birthday. None of them had labels or serial numbers—no printed contents list. No barcode etched along the side like a warning. Just bags. Just stuff.

Stuff meant for her.

“I can carry them,” she said quickly, fingers already reaching.

Natasha didn’t stop her. She just watched. Measured. Then gave a single nod.

Wendy adjusted the bags in her arms—two light, one heavier than expected. Something boxy inside. Shoes, maybe. She didn’t know what to do with the feeling that came with it. It wasn’t gratitude. Not really. But it was close to relief—a gentler kind of readiness.

She turned toward the elevator, only to hear Tony speak behind her.

“Hey.”

She paused.

Tony stood with one hand on the back of the couch, the other resting on his hip. He didn’t look flippant. Or smug. Just… steady. Maybe he’d been trying all night to find the right balance and had finally landed on something close.

“If you need anything else,” he said, quieter now, “you let me know. Alright?”

Wendy stared at him, his whiskey brown eyes staring back. She’d seen pictures of him many times in her life. Some of her handlers liked to use articles detailing his… galavants as a kind of manipulative tool. It was a way of saying he doesn’t need you. Never has, never will .

But the man standing before him screamed the opposite. 

She nodded.

The elevator pinged softly. Natasha stepped inside and waited.

“Try not to explode anything while we’re gone,” she called, dry.

“Can’t promise that,” Tony called back. “Statistically, something’s due.”

Wendy missed the next thing Clint said—just a low sound like a laugh, then the elevator doors closed.

Inside the lift, everything quieted. The overhead light was soft. Muted. Natasha didn’t speak.

Wendy didn’t either. She didn’t need to.

Her arms ached a little—the lack of consistent exercise making itself known—but she didn’t set the bags down. She wanted to carry them. Maybe just for a while.

They were hers.

Chapter Text

“Good morning! Rise and seize the future.”

The voice was flat, mechanical, and unforgivably loud.

The girl groaned, eyes peeling open slowly. The first thing she saw was a waft of black fur, far too close to her face.

“Vader, you know the rules,” she groaned. Her right hand yanked against the cuff around her wrist, snapping her fingers twice. The dog leaped off the bed, trotting to his own bed. Where he was supposed to sleep, not with her. 

She sighed, staring at the dog. “You’re lucky no one caught you.”

Her dorm was a cold cell with minimal personality—gray cement walls, scuffed floor, a sealed window letting in the faint dawn of May. The black comforter on her bed was better than the old cot’s cotton blanket, its fabric rough against her skin. A steel desk held the few books she had collected: Fahrenheit 451 , From H-Bomb to Star Wars , Widows , Animal Farm . Their edges were worn, her notes tucked inside, neat and sharp. Antiseptic stung her nose, the air frigid despite Vader’s lingering warmth. He lay on his mat, with smooth black fur, his eyes alert and trained to follow her every instruction. But he’d snuck beside her again, a little secret they hid from the outside world.

Her dorm was a concrete shoebox with just enough polish to qualify as personal quarters: gray walls, a gray floor, and a gray ceiling. The window—sealed shut—let in a haze of early May light. Her bed, narrow and steel-framed, sat under a weighted black comforter, better than the cot she’d started with. Progress. Her desk was immaculately arranged: a lamp, a few standard-issue pens, and her collection of contraband books. F ahrenheit 451. From H-Bomb to Star Wars. Widows. Animal Farm . Their spines were creased with wear, pages dog-eared and underlined with sharp, tidy notes.

The key she kept under her pillow unlocked the cuff; it was a long-standing habit she continued, even though no one regulated it anymore. She rubbed her wrist and sat up, breathing in the sharp tang of metal. Vader watched her without blinking, waiting for his next command, always waiting. Always obedient. 

The perfect tool.

She dressed quickly: a standard-issue button-down shirt, a pleated gray skirt, Mary Janes, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail. From the desk, she slipped two textbooks into her backpack: The Calculus of Loyalty and Asymmetric Warfare: The Cold War’s Modern Child . She adjusted the strap on her shoulder, emptying the last serving of kibble into his food bowl. She’d need to pick up another pack from the dispensary today. He waited patiently until she released him to eat. The girl ran her hand up and down his back a couple of times, steadying herself to join the fray.

The halls were already humming. Stark white lights buzzed above as other students filed toward the cafeteria or their assigned drills. Her shoes clicked on the floor in rhythm—measured, practiced, quiet. She made it halfway to the cafeteria before Ruby Hale fell into step beside her.

“Heard they picked you.”

The girl didn’t stop walking. “What?”

“You got an early placement,” Ruby said. Her tone was casual, but her smile was tight. “Don’t know where. No one’s ever been picked early before.”

The girl scoffed. “Give me a break. They won’t place me early. They don’t even want to place me after graduation.”

“Yeah,” Ruby said, tilting her head. “Funny how they keep the broken ones close and never let the dangerous ones out of arm’s reach.”

She maturely let that comment slide away. “They don’t trust me.”

Ruby’s voice cooled. “Maybe they don’t have to.”

They reached the cafeteria, boiled eggs and buttered toast thick in the air. She ate her breakfast mechanically—two boiled eggs, a bowl of cornflakes with drizzled honey—while she listened to Ruby bitch about Dharma’s sloppy footwork in the combat trials. Her eyes stayed on her tray, the cornflakes’ crunch loud in her ears. 

Early placement. The words sat heavy, like a stone in her stomach. 

Class was next. Dr. Steger’s room smelled of chalk dust and dry paper. He lectured on neural inhibitors, his pointer tapping the board. She took her seat near the back. Asymmetric Warfare lay open on her desk. Her pencil moved somewhat neatly, filling the page with notes. Other students whispered about the trials, their pencils scratching against the paper. She focused on the page. Her hand rested on the backpack strap, fingers tracing its edge. 

A knock echoed against the frame of the classroom door. Dr. Steger paused mid-sentence, his pointer lowering.

The door opened. A man stood on the threshold. Clean-cut. Civilian suit. Sunglasses indoors. He said nothing.

Dr. Steger didn’t seem surprised. “Miss Stark.”

The girl’s pencil froze mid-word.

“Pack your things. You’re leaving with him.”

A dozen heads turned. Then the whispers started. Her eyes lifted slowly. She closed her book and slid it into her backpack without a word. The click of the zipper was loud in the silence.

She rose. Steady. Silent. Backpack slung over one shoulder. She didn’t look at anyone else. Just walked to the back; her steps were small and precise.

The man nodded once and turned.

They didn’t speak in the hall. His pace was clipped, purposeful. Hers matched it, despite the acid brewing low in her stomach.

When they reached the lower corridor, the air got colder. The linoleum gave way to concrete. She caught the flicker of security cameras and the thrum of generators—the loading dock. 

The doors opened, and the brisk wind of May hit her face. A black SUV waited at the curb. Two uniformed guards stood by the rear door.

“Where am I going?” she asked.

The man didn’t answer.

“I wasn’t told I was being reassigned.”

Still silence.

Her voice sharpened. “I’m not due for placement. You don’t even know if I would have passed the final exam.”

“Are you suggesting you would have failed?” the man said, not even glancing her direction.

One of the guards stepped forward, pulling a syringe from his coat.

She turned to the guard. “I’m not going to fight you.”

His expression didn’t change.

“I’d just like to know where I’m going.”

The syringe plunged into her upper arm.

“Wait—”

Her knees buckled. The cement tilted. The surrounding voices muddled in her ears. The back of her head pitched up, and her eyes squinted at the bright, blurry sun peaking over the mountain in the distance. 

She fell to her side, and someone caught her before she hit the ground. 

Her thoughts scattered like spilled glass.

Vader.

She’d fed him that morning. A full scoop. He was still in her dorm room—obedient, patient, waiting by the door. He’d wait for hours. Maybe all day. He wouldn’t bark. He never barked.

No one would think to check on him.

Her cheek pressed to a fabric seat. A car door slammed. Motion jolted her spine.

She didn’t know if her eyes were open anymore.

Vader wouldn’t understand.

But he’d survive. He was trained for that. Adaptable. Loyal. He’d follow someone else if they gave him the command word.

Still, the thought hollowed her out.

At least whatever happens to him won’t be at her hands.

She would never have passed the final exam anyway.

Then everything went black.

Wendy’s eyes opened to filtered morning light slanting across the ceiling. For a second, the weight of the dream still pressed down on her chest—concrete walls, Vader’s warm fur, the sharp burn of the syringe. Her right wrist was stretched above her head, fingers curled lightly against the pillow.

Old habits.

She brought her arm down slowly, rubbing the faint imprint of the cuff she hadn’t worn in years. Her voice barely made a sound, more breath than words.

“Rise and seize the future.”

She sat up, gently setting Peter the Bear against the pillow. The guest room was quiet, warm, and nothing like her dorm. No antiseptic bite in the air. No metal furniture. Just clean sheets, a folded blanket at the foot of the bed, and the soft pajamas Natasha had insisted she take. The cotton had held onto the scent of lavender detergent.

In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and ran cold water over her face until she felt like her skin belonged to her again. She pulled her hair back in a low ponytail, methodical and even. No regulation telling her to, but it felt wrong to leave it loose today. Besides, it would only get in the way.

She’d already set the clothes aside the night before, a small folded stack waiting on the counter. The leggings were black, insulated, and the stitching precise. Expensive. Pepper had definitely splurged on what she had called “basics” . The thermal base layer had a tag with Russian lettering that was faded by time and washing—Natasha’s. The outer layer was new: windproof cargo pants and a fitted, fleece-lined hoodie in dark blue. 

It was harder to get on than she expected, fighting to maneuver her elbows and hands through the sleeves. She caught her reflection in the mirror and almost laughed. The hoodie zipped up high enough to cover her mouth, the collar rising awkwardly under her nose. Her hair had mussed during the struggle, one piece sticking out like a cowlick. She looked... ridiculous. But warm.

It was already too warm. She tugged at the hem, debating whether to ditch the hoodie for now, then decided against it. Better to adjust later than freeze on the roof.

Everything was layered with intent. 

New York would be cold, but Manitoba would be colder.

Wendy looked at herself in the mirror for a long moment—not studying, just... seeing.

The girl in the reflection didn’t look ready.

But she didn’t look like she’d run either.

That would have to be enough.

A soft chime sounded above the bathroom mirror.

“Miss Stark,” JARVIS said, his voice calm and unhurried, “breakfast is being served in the penthouse kitchen on the 89th floor. Miss Potts has prepared a meal for you and Mr. Stark before departure. You have approximately twenty-seven minutes before scheduled departure.”

Wendy blinked. It wasn’t the words that caught her off guard—it was the way they were said. Calm. Routine. Like she did this every morning.

Breakfast. Served.

Not trays slid through a slot in a door. Not lukewarm bowls lined up on a metal counter. Not silence broken only by chewing and the scrape of plastic spoons. Even the thought made a shudder run down her spine.

“Okay,” she said.

She paused only to slide her feet into her new boots and grab her new go-bag. They fit perfectly, surprisingly, and tying up the laces created extra support around her ankles. The strap of the black duffle bag settled onto her shoulder as she closed the door to the room. The walk to the elevator was quiet; it seemed no one was present on the floor. 

The elevator chimed open with its usual polite hum. She stepped in.

“Eighty-ninth floor,” JARVIS confirmed, already moving.

The gentle ascent was over in seconds.

When the doors opened, more warmth greeted her before anything else. Not just heat, though the floor-to-ceiling windows let in the first hints of sunrise, catching the gleam of the metal floor lamp next to the cloudlike sofa—but something softer. She followed the warmth through the entry hall and the archway on her right. The smells were welcoming. Something like cinnamon and ham and—

Pepper was already at the stove, back turned, her hair up and sleeves rolled as she poured something from a small pan. The smell of eggs and sautéed vegetables filled the space. There was a paper container of what looked like cinnamon rolls. It looked like Pepper was making omelettes. The smell of coffee wafted from the coffee machine next to the fridge.

Tony, already dressed, it seemed, sat at the counter, lazily flipping through the pages of a contract. A mug of coffee sat next to him, the yellow words “insert cheesy phrase” glaring against the white ceramic.

Wendy stepped in, hesitating just past the threshold.

This was domesticity she didn’t know how to name. A kind she’d only ever seen in movies or books, in fractured dreams, in flickers of “Maybe” sung under breath like a spell. 

But this wasn’t a movie. This wasn’t a book. This was right in front of her.

Pepper turned at the sound of her steps, a quick smile blooming across her face. “Morning, sweetheart. An omelette okay?”

Tony looked up over the rim of his coffee mug. “You’re just in time. I was about to eat your half.”

Wendy blinked, unsure how to respond. Not because of the words. But because the ache they stirred didn’t hurt.

She gave a slight nod, then crossed the kitchen.

The counter stool was tall, but she didn’t mind climbing. Her boots made a soft thump against the footrest as she sat.

Pepper turned back to the stove with practiced ease. “Omelette’s almost ready. I used spinach, ham, and mushrooms—I figured hearty but light would be best this morning.”

Wendy nodded again, slower this time. “Thank you.”

“Juice or tea?” Pepper asked, already reaching for a clean glass.

“Water, please,” she said after a moment. “If that’s okay.”

“More than okay,” Tony said. “I mean, it’s a flat option, but you’re welcome to anything that doesn’t have alcohol in it.”

“Better than burnt coffee,” Wendy murmured. The words were light, but her voice was cautious, testing the ground beneath her.

Tony only raised a brow in exaggerated offense. “Wow. I am wounded.”

But he said it with a grin, not a mask. And Wendy’s shoulders dropped the tiniest degree. 

Pepper set a glass of water next to her. Then came the plate: one neat two-egg omelette folded over greens, with sliced apples and a cinnamon roll on the edge. It looked like a lot, but it all looked good.

Wendy picked up her fork, paused, then took a bite.

Warm. Soft. Savory.

She reached for the water next and took a slow sip.

And only after she swallowed did the thought arrive—quiet and cold, like a hand around her throat:

She hadn’t checked it first.

Hadn’t hesitated. Hadn’t watched them cook, hadn’t helped, hadn’t waited for them to eat from the same plate. She hadn’t waited for proof.

She blinked at the glass, suddenly unsure if she should keep holding it.

How could she let her guard down so quickly? After everything?

Her stomach gave a confused lurch—not from the food, but from the unfamiliar calm in her chest. That old warning voice wanted to scream: What are you doing? Don’t be stupid. You know better.

But then Tony spoke again, half through a mouthful of omelette. “So—real talk—if I had to fight one breakfast food in single combat, it’d be a cinnamon roll. All that icing? No rules. No honor.”

Wendy blinked, startled, then glanced at him. He was elbow-deep in a dramatic monologue, gesturing with his fork like the stakes were high. It was just random enough that her brain stalled, trying to make sense of the words.

Pepper didn’t even look up from her plate. “You say that about waffles, too.”

“That’s different,” Tony said gravely. “Waffles are structured. Cinnamon rolls are chaos in frosting form. They are deceptive .”

Wendy stared, unsure if he was joking or not. “Do you always rank meals by combat threat?”

Tony nodded sagely. “It’s an underrated survival metric.”

Pepper didn’t even look up. “It’s a long-running joke from his college days.”

“Hey. That chart was groundbreaking,” Tony said. “If I hadn’t pulled an all-nighter arguing waffle structure, I might not be the man I am today.”

Pepper raised an eyebrow. “You and Rhodey spent three hours arguing through a presentation trying to explain this to me. Ranking breakfast food by lethality. It was stupid.”

Tony held up a finger. “It was a quantitative risk analysis. ”

“Your axis labels were ‘Crunch Factor’ and ‘Sticky Radius.’”

“They were accurate. ”

Pepper sighed, turning back to her plate. “God help me, I think you submitted it to a conference.”

“It was peer reviewed, ” Tony said, pointing his fork in emphasis. “Rhodey was the peer.”

“You can find the Fibonacci sequence in a cinnamon roll,” Wendy said, the information just falling out unbidden. “Sometimes.” She then proceeded to shove a large forkful of omelette into her mouth to prevent her from talking.

Tony’s brows lifted, like she’d handed him an excellent puzzle piece. “Only the good ones.”

Wendy glanced sideways, forcing herself to swallow. She just had to ask: “Do you always consider the physical threat level of breakfast food?”

Tony didn’t miss a beat. “Only the ones that can kill me in three bites or less. Which is, statistically, most of them.”

“That’s not how statistics work,” she murmured.

“Sure it is. I just haven’t told you what the sample size is.”

She took another bite of her omelette—smaller this time.

Not because she decided it was safe, but because her body already believed it was.

“I regret to inform you,” JARVIS’s voice rang through the ceiling, “but Captain Rogers is inquiring about your whereabouts.”

Pepper sighed, folding her napkin with unnecessary precision. “There goes the last five minutes of peace.”

Tony groaned, pushing back from the table with theatrical weight. “Tragic. And I was just about to rank bagels by density. You’ll never know how deadly a toasted everything bagel can be.”

Wendy gazed at both of them, not entirely sure where the joke ended and the genuine consternation began. It didn’t seem to matter.

Pepper leaned down to kiss Tony on the cheek, gentle and familiar. “Stay warm. Stay smart. And let Natasha talk first.”

“No promises.”

She rolled her eyes, then turned to Wendy. The smile she gave wasn’t the same one directed at Tony—it was smaller, quieter. Still real, but careful.

“Don’t let him talk you into anything you don’t want to do.”

Wendy nodded.

The elevator hummed, quiet. Wendy stood beside Tony in the silence, watching the floor numbers tick downward. No music. No small talk. Just the ambient sounds of modern precision and the quiet swipe of Tony’s fingers over his wrist display, dismissing alerts as they came.

He didn’t look at her when he spoke.

“If you’re having second thoughts, now’s the time.”

She shook her head.

He gave the faintest nod. “Okay. Just checking.”

The rest of the descent passed in silence.

The parking garage beneath the Tower smelled like oil and concrete—cooler than upstairs, with the low thrum of machinery behind the walls. Rows of Stark-branded vehicles sat lined in neat, gleaming formation, polished and ready to be used.

But the one waiting near the exit looked different.

A scuffed-up gray seven-seater SUV with out-of-state plates, a cracked but functioning tail light, and a frame that looked like it had survived more winters than it should have. It didn’t look like a Stark Industries asset. That felt deliberate.

Steve and Natasha were already there. Natasha leaned against the hood, arms folded, dressed in black layers that didn’t scream combat but didn’t quite say civilian either. Steve stood beside her, a travel thermos in one hand, a duffel slung over his shoulder.

Clint emerged from the back with a second bag and a rolled-up sleeping pad tucked under his arm. “She’s packed and quiet,” he said. “Full tank. Tires clean. No trackers.”

“Plates?” Tony asked, eyes scanning the vehicle.

“Borrowed. They won’t notice until Tuesday.”

Natasha gave Wendy a once-over, unreadable but not unkind. “The layers look good. There’s more cold gear in the back. Try not to freeze.”

Steve nodded toward the rear door. “We’ve got blankets and food, too. Take what you need.”

Tony walked a slow half-circle around the car, checking something internal only he could see. When he stopped near the passenger door, he didn’t open it. Just looked at the rest of them and spoke low.

“We’ll have JARVIS until we hit the border. After that, no phone signals. No internet. We leave the grid now and stay off it. Three days. No mistakes.”

The others nodded. No one said anything else.

Wendy stood there for a second longer. Then she moved, climbing into the back seat without being told.

The door closed behind her with a soft click, and that was that.

Clint claimed the passenger seat without fuss. Steve and Natasha took the middle row.

No one spoke.

They slowly rolled out of the garage, headlights off until they reached the lower ramp. The Tower faded behind them, just another tall shape against the steel-gray dawn.

Manhattan looked different at this hour. Less like a monument, more like an old machine waking up—steam rising from sewer grates, delivery trucks huffing along half-empty avenues, people wrapped in scarves with coffee cups tucked close to their chests.

Wendy leaned her head against the cold window glass. Her breath fogged faintly with every exhale.

They hit the bridge by 7:20.

The SUV handled well—Tony wouldn’t have allowed anything else—but there was still an old heaviness in its frame that made the road feel real. No hover, no hum. Just tires and time and the slow, steady rhythm of escape.

Ten minutes outside city limits, Steve finally spoke. “We’ve got a long haul ahead. Let’s trade drivers every four hours. No one gets overtired.”

“Already set the schedule,” Clint said. “I’m next after Tony. Then you.”

Steve didn’t argue.

The rest of the morning passed in quiet stints. Podcasts were out. Music, too. Nothing traceable. Wendy didn’t ask. She didn’t look like she wanted noise anyway.

By the time they crossed into Pennsylvania, the sun was up and the trees had taken on that leafless, midwinter stretch—bare limbs against white sky. Clint handed back granola bars without turning around. Wendy took hers without a word.

“Drink something, too,” Natasha said, soft but even. “Dehydration sneaks up faster in the cold.”

Wendy nodded. She unscrewed the cap on the stainless steel thermos she’d been given. The water tasted faintly of metal, but it was clean. Room temperature. Not enough to sting.

Red flags waved in the back of her mind, but Wendy decided in that moment that the constant suspicion would become exhausting very quickly. She’s spent the last fifteen years of her life being suspicious of people. She’d earned her break.

Hours passed.

They took the 80 west. The traffic thinned. Towns blurred past. Wendy memorized overpasses. Counted red barns. Found faces in the frost streaks along the glass.

Tony drove like he’d done this before—not fast, not flashy, just intentional. Every lane change was calculated. Every mirror glance meant something. At one point, he tapped a sequence into the steering column, and the dashboard dimmed completely, replaced by a matte panel with a single green LED.

“EMP shielding,” he explained, though no one had asked. “Old S.H.I.E.L.D. paranoia. Turned out to be good for dodging the NSA.”

Wendy didn’t look up. But she filed it away.

Near Erie, they stopped for gas, not at a station—just a long-abandoned rest area tucked behind a curtain of leafless trees, where Clint popped the trunk and unhooked a red jerry can. They worked fast. No one stretched. No one wandered.

Back on the road, Tony passed the wheel to Clint without ceremony and climbed into the back beside Wendy, a protein bar between his teeth.

“You’ve got a tell,” he said, chewing. “When you’re thinking too hard. You stare holes through windows.”

She blinked slowly. 

“Don’t worry,” he added. “It’s better than pacing. Less floor damage.”

“It’s not like we have room to pace,” she said quietly.

Tony smiled around the last bite of his protein bar. “True. But you’d find a way. Stark genes are stubborn like that.”

She didn’t answer. But the silence didn’t shut him out, either.

He shifted in his seat, leaning back just enough to stretch one leg into the footwell. The motion drew Natasha’s attention from the middle row. She turned slightly in her seat to glance back at them—just a flick of her eyes, sharp and steady. Not assessing. Not quite.

“Everything okay back there?”

Wendy met her gaze. “Yes.”

Tony tilted his head toward Natasha. “She’s quiet. I’m annoying. Balance of nature.”

“You’re not annoying,” Wendy said.

Tony gave a low, mock-humbled sigh. “Don’t say that in front of Pepper. She’s been trying to convince me otherwise for years.”

From the front passenger seat, Clint gave a small laugh. “I think Pepper just knows the truth and loves you anyway. Big difference.”

The road went on.

Snow started falling somewhere around Toledo—light at first, then heavier. Steve checked the radar from a scrambled Stark tablet, tracking the storm band as it moved east.

“This’ll slow us a little,” he murmured.

Tony just nodded. “It’ll also slow anyone trying to follow.”

By dusk, they were deep into Michigan. Dinner was some pre-packaged jerky and a few different kinds of bagged chips, eaten in the car. No one complained.

They didn’t plan to stop for the night. Not unless they had to. They had seventy-two hours to get to Churchill and back, and every minute on the road was one less spent on foot in freezing terrain, searching for a man who might not want to be found.

Still, as the temperature dropped and the roads iced, Clint’s voice broke the silence.

“We’ll need to pull over soon. Check the tires. Fill up again. Take a heat break.”

Tony nodded. “There should be a pull-off fifteen miles ahead.”

Steve leaned forward, eyes on the road ahead. “And after that?”

Tony glanced at the clock.

“After that,” he said, “we cross into Minnesota.”

The gas station wasn’t on any updated map. Just a lone, slumped building near a frozen field, half-buried in windblown snow. The paint had long since peeled from the siding, leaving the exposed wood to groan when the wind hit it just right. One pump still worked—barely—dispensing about half a gallon a minute with the rattling wheeze of something that hadn’t seen maintenance since the Clinton administration.

They didn’t turn off the SUV, just idled close enough to keep the tank warm while Tony and Steve handled the pump. 

Clint cracked the driver’s door. “I know, I know. Engine’s still on. Not exactly safety protocol, but it’s fifteen degrees and dropping.”

Tony didn’t even look up. “It’s got built-in vapor shields. I built it myself. Unless you plan to drop a match in the tank, we’re fine.”

Quietly, she heard Steve mutter: “Why do you even have this car?”

The rest of them waited nearby. The sky had faded to a deep pewter, clouds thick and low like bruises. Snow still fell in delicate spirals, soft enough to seem almost harmless.

Wendy stepped away from the car, just far enough to feel the hush of the cold around her.

Snowflakes landed on her hoodie, on her sleeves, on the exposed skin of her face. One settled on her nose and melted in the warmth of her breath. Her cheeks had gone red with the cold—she couldn’t feel the tip of her nose anymore—but she didn’t move. The air was quiet here in a way that made her bones ache.

She heard footsteps behind her—light, steady, unhurried. The sound barely pressed against the quiet, but it was enough.

She didn’t turn. She already knew who it was.

Natasha came to stand beside her, not close enough to crowd, not far enough to feel distant. Just present.

They stood like that for a while. Wind stirring the snow. The old pump rattling. The quiet crackle of ice shifting under tires.

Wendy spoke first.

“How long did it take you to get used to this?”

Her voice was low. Careful. The question had been on her mind every time she saw the Black Widow smile, relax, and fully lean into her life with these people.

Natasha didn’t ask what she meant.

“A while,” she said. Her breath curled white in the air. “Longer than I wanted. Shorter than I deserved.”

Wendy nodded. Once. Then again, slower.

There was a kind of honesty in the cold. In the way it stripped things down. In the way it asked nothing except endurance.

“Did you ever think it was a trick?” Wendy asked.

Natasha's gaze didn’t move from the field in front of them. “Sometimes,” she said quietly. “Especially when it felt good.”

Wendy’s hands were jammed into the sleeves of her coat, fingers curled around the stretchy fabric of the thumbholes. Her shoulders were drawn tight, but not from the cold.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “That’s the worst part.”

Wendy shifted beside Natasha, snowflakes melting in her hair. Her voice had steadied, just a little.

“I don’t know how to trust it.”

“You don’t have to,” Natasha said. “Not yet.”

Wendy looked over at her then. Not long. Just enough.

Natasha didn’t look back. But her voice softened again, enough to make the words land.

“You just have to survive it. The rest comes later.”

From the other side of the lot, Tony called, “We’re topped off! Or as close as this junker can get us.”

Steve clapped snow from his gloves. Clint turned toward the sound, giving them both a moment longer before motioning them back with a nod.

Natasha didn’t say anything else. She just turned and walked toward the car, the snow hushing under her boots.

Wendy followed, her steps quiet, her breath steady. She didn’t speak again until they were back inside and moving.

But she’d heard it.

Near the passenger door, Clint stood with his arms folded, pretending to scan the tree line. He hadn’t meant to listen. Hadn’t even realized he was listening until Natasha answered.

Her voice carried differently now—he’d learned to recognize that edge in it. Like stepping out of armor. Like walking barefoot over ground riddled with nails.

He exhaled through his nose and looked away. Guilt wasn’t the right word for what he felt. Maybe something older. Something heavier.

Clint knew that the arrow necklace was still around Natasha’s neck. She was never one for sentiment, but she wore it every day.  He’d seen her wear it every day since Budapest. Never called it out. Never asked. He didn’t want to assume, but he would anyway—it was a symbol of her own growth. 

Clint had brought her in, years ago. Vouched for her when no one else would. He’d watched her fight tooth and nail for a second life, rebuild herself one choice at a time. And still, even now, moments like this reminded him that some part of her still held her breath when it felt good.

Of course the kid does too. She doesn’t know any better.

He exhaled slowly, steam curling from his lips, and let his gaze drift back to the road ahead.

They were both still learning how to stop flinching.

But they were learning.

Chapter Text

Wendy didn’t sleep.

That wasn’t new. She hadn’t expected to. But the longer they drove, the more it felt like she was probably supposed to, as if rest would just happen now, because someone else was at the wheel.

Wendy pressed her forehead against the window, half for the cold, half to anchor herself. The glass vibrated faintly with the rumble of the tires. Snow flicked past the headlights in slow, glowing swirls—like ash in reverse.

She kept her eyes mostly open. When they burned too much, she let them close just long enough to count her heartbeat. Twenty-four. Sometimes thirty. Never longer. Every time she slipped a little further, her muscles jerked like a misfire. Her body didn’t believe it was safe.

Someone shifted behind her. A sigh. The creak of leather. She didn’t look.

Tony was driving. She could tell by the pattern of his humming—random notes under his breath, that his thoughts just leaked out when he wasn’t guarding them. Clint was in the passenger seat, tapping the window rhythmically with his finger. Steve and Natasha were behind her in the back row, sleeping in turns. Or trying to.

Wendy made her breathing even. Let her head tilt just enough to fake it. If anyone glanced her way, she’d look asleep. Just another kid on a road trip buried in a hoodie. Not the one who’d memorized every exit they’d passed, every potential weapon within reach, every subtle change in tone between the people she was supposed to trust.

It wasn’t fear. It was calculation . Habit. The instinct to watch until watching wasn't necessary anymore. To keep one eye open.

She wanted to believe it might stop one day. Her body allowed her to feel comfortable enough to eat the food they provided, but she also knew what happened when you let your guard down before the perimeter was secure.

Her shoulder ached from holding tension too long. Her hands were balled into the sleeves of her coat, fingers curled into the fabric like a grip. She tried to let herself relax. Once. Twice. Her body refused.

Up ahead, the road stretched into dark silence.

Sleep would have to wait.

The SUV slowed just enough to dip into a long curve. Wendy felt it shift beneath her as the tires pressed into the packed snow. Then the sound of gravel again, peppered by wind, and a soft hitch in the engine as they eased off the road.

Tony’s humming cut off mid-note.

“Alright, Cap, tag in,” he said, his voice rough with fatigue. “I’m going to crawl into the back and try to convince myself that the RTD can of sludge from earlier was worth it.”

He’d drunk two before the first round of critiques about canned coffee came through.

Even if she had managed to get some sleep, it wouldn’t have been restful having to play musical chairs every time drivers swapped out. Steve’s boots hit the snow with a soft crunch as he circled around, and the backseat right door swung open with a creak that let the cold slip in like a hand under the collar. Wendy moved to the back row, Natasha taking the passenger’s seat, and Clint sprawling sideways in the middle row.

She could feel Steve’s presence when he passed her window—solid, purposeful. The driver's door opened and shut again with a gentle thud. A few seconds later, the SUV rolled forward once more, smoother now. Steve drove like he breathed: quiet and steady, fully in control.

Tony mumbled something in passing as he climbed into the third row. The seat beside Wendy shifted under his weight. She watched him heave his body into some kind of reclining position, using the car wall as a backrest and stretching one leg out. He glanced briefly at her out of the corner of his eye before they slid shut, hands tapping a rhythm against his stomach.

Outside, the snow had lightened to a whisper. The clouds overhead thinned, the stars bleeding through in pale scatterings. Wendy shifted her gaze to them, following the motionless horizon.

The stars reminded her of a place she didn’t remember clearly.

She must’ve been seven. Maybe younger. She couldn’t recall the exact year, and most of the time it didn’t matter. But tonight, in the dark hush of the road, she could see it clearer than usual—the way the sky had looked above a cabin somewhere in Kentucky, nestled near the edge of a cave system.

It was named after an animal, maybe. Someone had said the name once, low and slow, as if it was important—a man with hands too clean and a voice too kind.

They kept her in the cabin for what must have been weeks. She didn’t remember why. She didn’t remember where she was before that, either. The inside had smelled like mildew and cigarettes, and the heat kicked on only when someone thought to flip the switch. But there’d been a rule—she was allowed outside, as long as she stayed within a marked range. She hadn’t broken it. Not then.

That was before she learned to think for herself.

The nights were the only good part. Nestled deep within the woods, the cabin was incredibly isolated. There were no lights around for as far as she could see, no light pollution reducing visibility in the sky. It was the kind of black that swallowed everything but the shining stars, stretching out over the trees. She would lie on her back in the brittle grass and stare until her eyes hurt, waiting to see one of them move. Sometimes they did. Satellites, maybe. Maybe something else.

She remembered the chill in her bones. The quiet. The sense—fleeting and foreign—that the world was impossibly wide and she was still somehow inside it.

There was a whole other world waiting for her beyond the sky.

Now, the SUV vibrated faintly beneath her. The windows fogged gently around the edges. Tony’s breathing had evened out into something close to sleep. She curled her fingers deeper into her sleeves, thumb pressed hard into the seam.

For a moment, Wendy believed she hadn’t thought of the stars in years. Hadn’t let herself. The memory didn’t fit anywhere useful. It didn’t warn. It didn’t hurt. It just lingered—suspended between before and after, between a girl lying in the dark and whatever she became next.

But then, unwelcome in her mind, came the memory of James’s naïve voice whispering about Neverland through the wall separating them. 

“Second star to the right,” she whispered, barely audible under the gentle rumble of the road beneath them. “And straight on till morning.”

She wished she had brought the bear.

They drove like that for a while, through empty miles. No music. No talking. Just the sound of tires, wind, and the breath of people trying to rest.

Then, finally, in the distance, a dull orange glow blinked through the trees. Low lights. Runway-grade. The kind that didn’t advertise.

The airstrip came into view like a secret emerging from shadow—narrow, unmarked, and lined with enough snow to swallow sound. A hangar squatted at the far end, flanked by what might’ve once been a refueling station. Faint light spilled out from a cracked door, casting a long shadow on the tarmac.

Steve eased the SUV to a stop. Doors opened, boots hit the ground, and cold bit through her hoodie with a shiver.

A figure stood near the hangar—broad-shouldered, bearded, and bundled in a canvas coat that looked older than the runway. He didn’t wave.

Clint was the first to approach. “Hey, Mikey.”

The man didn’t blink. “That’s not my name, Hawkass.”

“Sure, Mikey.”

The man’s face remained impressively blank, like he was calculating whether smuggling five Americans—well, four Americans and a Russian—across the Canadian border for him was worth the felony charge. 

“You get my text?”

Clint tilted his head toward Tony, who was already stepping forward, hands buried in his coat pockets. “You’ll find your efforts have not gone unappreciated.”

Tony passed him a heavy envelope. The man weighed it with the same casual gravity someone might give a loaded pistol. Then, he extended his hand to Tony.

“James Scully,” he said. “I’ll be your pilot this evening.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “Listen, we can’t break the sound barrier. This isn’t a drug run out of Singapore.”

“My man,” Scully said dryly, “we can’t even break 700 miles an hour unless you wanna fly alongside us to lighten the load. It’s gonna be even slower on the way back with the green guy.”

He turned and led them toward the aircraft within the hangar.

It was a Cessna Citation X—sleek, low-profile, fast when it wanted to be. Painted dull gray, stripped of insignia, its usual polish dulled by travel and weather. One of the back wheels had a fresh mud smear across the rim. A few patches along the fuselage had been hastily resealed. Functional, not flashy. Big enough to seat eight and carry gear, small enough to stay under radar if they kept their altitude low.

Scully opened the hatch and stepped aside. “We’ve got jump seats and two bench rows. Strap in. No flight attendant, no peanuts. Welcome to the high life, kids.”

Wendy climbed in behind the others. The interior was cramped. Not claustrophobic, just tight. The lighting overhead was low. Bench seats ran along the port side, with fold-downs near the rear. No carpeting—just stripped floorboards and exposed bolt plates.

A few duffels were already strapped down in the corners, and two industrial thermoses rattled gently in a bin marked “COFFEE / DO NOT KICK.”

Naturally, she tapped it with her foot.

When she looked up, Natasha was smirking at her.

Wendy ducked her head and found an open seat along the wall, pressing herself into the harness. It bit across her shoulder awkwardly until she adjusted the length.

Clint and Steve ran through a verbal cross-check with Scully while Tony stowed his own gear and dropped into a seat across from her, handing her a water bottle. Natasha sat nearby, arms crossed, eyes closed but not resting.

The hatch sealed with a thick metallic clunk, followed by the whir of hydraulics.

The engines spun up in a low, rising whine, steady and unhurried. It didn’t sound like takeoff yet—more like testing the system. Scully’s voice came over the comm.

“Brace for acceleration. No sudden movements unless you enjoy whiplash.”

The plane began to move, taxiing slowly across the frozen tarmac. There weren’t any ATC towers in sight—just a straight line.

Then the push came—sharp and physical. The floor angled slightly. Wendy’s shoulder hit the seat behind her as she steadied herself, feeling the press of ascent behind her ribs.

She always liked this part of flying. The press of gravity against her body, pulling her to the ground while she was being hauled out of its grasp.

The wheels lifted. The trees dropped away.

They were in the air.

The cabin stayed quiet for the first few minutes. No one spoke. Just the soft hum of altitude gain and the occasional creak of the interior adjusting to the pressure. She felt her ears pop.

Then Clint let out a long breath. “Alright, place your bets—how many hours before Stark starts complaining about the legroom?”

Tony didn’t even open his eyes. “Already filed a formal grievance with HR. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

“Thought you were our lawyer.”

“I’m a genius billionaire who took an online certification course in law on a whim. Not the same thing.”

Natasha snorted quietly without looking up. Steve, strapped in near the back, adjusted the Velcro on his winter gloves with exaggerated focus.

Wendy didn’t laugh, but she let the noise settle in her chest, like ambient static. It was easier to sit with than the silence.

The plane rocked gently as it leveled off, and Scully’s voice came over the intercom again: “Cruising at a modest sixteen hundred feet. Sit tight, stay out of the cockpit, and read the labels before you go touching my stuff.”

Tony raised one hand in a lazy salute, eyes still closed.

Wendy shifted her weight. Then again. Her boot knocked softly against the storage bin, and she adjusted her seatbelt for the third time. The harness felt wrong against her shoulder, too loose, then too tight. She folded her arms around the bottle and then unfolded them. Every position felt like she was waiting for something.

She was waiting, but she didn’t like how it felt.

Her fingers found the seam of her hoodie sleeve and began worrying it slowly—pinch, twist, release. Repeat. There was no rhythm to it, no pattern she was conscious of, but it was something.

Natasha cracked one eye open.

“You cold?” she asked, tone neutral.

Wendy shook her head. Then nodded. Then shrugged.

Tony cracked one eye open as well, glancing toward them. “There’s a blanket in the bin labeled ‘definitely not a parachute’. Take your chances.”

She didn’t move.

After a beat, Clint twisted around in his jump seat to face her. “You want the window?”

“No.”

“You sure? Could be worse. Could be middle seat.”

“I’m fine.”

Clint didn’t argue. He just shifted back and closed his eyes again. Not asleep. Just giving her space.

The plane buzzed gently beneath them. Setting the water bottle in the storage bin, Wendy glanced out the window anyway. It was dark. Not the same kind of dark as the stars above the cabin, but a colder one. Industrial. Below them, black shapes moved slowly across a blanker darkness. Roads, maybe. Trees. Rivers. She couldn’t tell.

She counted the rivets on the armrest. Then the bolts near the floor.

Her heel tapped once against the bin.

Natasha’s gaze flicked to her again, just for a second.

Her heel tapped again.

She stopped on the third. Drew her foot back under the seat and kept it there.

Her fingers, still hooked in the cuff of her sleeve, pinched tighter.

Steve exhaled from his spot in the furthest jump seat—it wasn’t loud, but deep enough to register. She didn’t turn around.

The air tasted dry. Over-filtered. It scratched faintly at the back of her throat, but she kept breathing shallow.

She reached for the water bottle Tony had handed her earlier and twisted the cap as quietly as she could. One sip. Then another. It didn’t help.

Her knee bounced once. Twice. Then stopped.

Natasha’s eyes were already on her. She didn’t say anything.

Wendy shifted her weight. Pulled her arms tighter around herself. Tried to press her shoulders back into the seat, but they wouldn’t stay still.

Her thumbnail found the inside edge of her sleeve. She pressed it there. Not hard enough to hurt—just to try and anchor herself, to stay here in the present.

The steady hum of the engine faded in and out of focus. Too constant. It made her restless.

She shifted again.

This time, Natasha moved, adjusting the heel of her boot on the floor. It was a slight sound, but it echoed in her ears.

“You want to stretch your legs?” she asked, low and casual.

Wendy didn’t answer right away. She stared at her hands. Then at the front of the cabin. 

“There’s room by the galley,” Natasha added. “Near the hatch. It’s clear.”

Humiliation was brewing in her chest. It wasn’t like she was trying to be disruptive.

Wendy gave a small nod, then she unbuckled her belt. Natasha stood too.

She moved toward the front of the cabin, boots steady on the exposed flooring. Her hip brushed the edge of one folded jump seat as she passed. Clint leaned back with his eyes closed, arms crossed loosely over his chest. Tony cracked one eye open when she passed, but didn’t say anything.

The main hatch sat just ahead, sealed and latched, with a short galley unit tucked along the left side of the wall. Storage drawers. A thermos rack. Nothing fancy. Just enough space to boil water or make something shelf-stable edible.

Natasha followed her. Close, but not crowding.

Wendy stepped aside once they reached the front, letting Natasha slide past into the narrow galley area. The lighting was even dimmer here, casting soft shadows across the steel trim and scratched cabinetry.

She shifted her weight onto one foot, then the other. Her arms crossed. Then fell. Then crossed again.

“I wasn’t trying to be loud,” she said quietly, eyes on a spot just past Natasha’s shoulder.

“You weren’t,” Natasha said, no correction in her voice. No edge. She always seemed to be just calm.

“I just can’t sit still that long.” Not when I’m trying so hard to stay awake. “It’s not a focus thing. Or being hyper. I just—can’t.”

“You don’t have to explain it.”

Wendy nodded, but it didn’t feel settled. Her eyes scanned the latch mechanisms on the hatch door. Then the storage panel. She read the label on a metal bin twice.

There was space here to move, barely. Two steps forward, one back. Enough to rock her weight. Enough to feel like she wasn’t stuck.

Natasha crouched briefly and flicked open one of the lower storage drawers. Inside was a short stack of emergency rations, a flashlight, and a sealed pouch of something marked “NO REHEAT REQUIRED.”

“You hungry?”

Wendy shook her head. “It’s not that.”

“Good. These are awful.”

It was quiet for a moment. Then:

“You want something to do?”

Wendy hesitated. “Like what?”

Natasha didn’t answer right away. She straightened, leaned a shoulder against the hatch wall, and looked down the length of the cabin toward the others. “Stay here.”

She shifted her weight, boot scuffing the floorboards, and her eyes landed on the cabinets lining the galley’s left wall. Steel, scratched, with latches that clicked when you pressed them. 

They were right there.

She glanced down the cabin. Natasha was a shadow near the jump seats, crouching by a duffel. No one else looked her way.

Wendy’s hand moved before she thought it through, flipping the first latch. The cabinet door swung open with a soft creak, cold metal grazing her knuckles. Inside, the shelves were half-empty, cluttered with practical things. A stack of plastic cups, warped from heat, teetered on the edge. A tin of instant coffee, dented, its label peeling like old skin. A bundle of zip ties, black and looped tightly, sat next to a roll of duct tape, its edges frayed. She counted the cups—seven. Her fingers hovered, not touching, just tracing the shapes in her mind.

The second cabinet was heavier, its latch sticking until she pressed harder. It opened to a narrow shelf crammed with gear. A flashlight with scratched glass rolled slightly when the plane tilted. Two emergency ration packs in foil pouches, also not reheatable, and smelled faintly of chemical preservatives even through the seals. A folded map, corners dog-eared, was wedged against a small first-aid kit, its zipper rusted and probably hard to open. She nudged the map with her fingertip, revealing a blunt pencil stub tucked beneath. Her eyes cataloged it all.

The third cabinet was smaller, tucked above the thermos rack. Its latch was loose, popping open with barely a touch. Inside, a single shelf held a miscellany of odds and ends. An orange coiled extension cord. A pair of work gloves, leather cracked, stiff with age. And there, pinned to the back wall with a rusted thumbtack, was a folded piece of newsprint, yellowed at the edges. 

Wendy’s breath caught, her fingers pausing mid-reach. She leaned closer, the hum of the engines fading to a distant buzz. It was like the sound cut out.

The paper was an obituary; its text was smudged but still legible. 

Jeff Scully, 32, of Augusta, Maine. Passed October 14, 2006. Survived by brother, James.  

The words were clipped, formal, but a handwritten note in blue ink curled along the margin: Always with me, JJ . 

The ink was faded, the paper creased from being folded and unfolded, as if it had been carried for years before being pinned here. Wendy’s eyes traced the date—2006. She was eight then, maybe nine, locked in her own kind of darkness. Her thumb pressed harder into her sleeve, the seam biting her skin.

She didn’t touch the obituary, didn’t have a need to. It was Scully’s, the pilot’s—James, not Mikey, as Clint had called him. He’d lost his brother. The weight of that note felt like a tether, probably was one for him. Just like she had Peter the Bear, Scully kept his brother close, here in the galley. Flying with a ghost.

Her fingers curled back, away from the cabinet. She shut the door, the latch clicking closed in a whisper. The obituary stayed in her head.

She opened the last cabinet, the smallest of the bunch, barely a locker. It was empty, except for a single item—a chipped ceramic mug, its handle cracked, with “World’s Okayest Pilot” scrawled in faded red. It rattled faintly when the plane shifted, unsecured. Wendy’s lips twitched, not quite a smile but definitely entertained. She closed the door, softer this time.

Natasha’s boots hit the floor behind her, and Wendy turned, heart jolting. The woman carried a black tactical box. 

“Tony and I prepared these last night, after you went to bed,” she said, popping open the case on the floor. “As you can see, it’s now a bit of a mess.”

And a mess it was. There were tangles of different coloured wires, a few earpieces, some wireless and some not, and who knew what else. 

Natasha gestured to the floor across from her. “Let’s sort this out.”

Wendy crouched slowly, knees cracking a little as she dropped to the floor across from Natasha. The case between them wasn’t large, but it was dense—coils of wire looping over each other, earpieces twisted into themselves like they’d been shoved in without a second thought.

Natasha didn’t rush her. She just reached in, pulled out one snarl of thin copper-red wire, and began to untangle it with quiet precision.

Wendy copied the movement. She picked a section that looked manageable—thicker cable, black with a faded silver tag near the end—and began working one knot loose with her thumbs.

“I don’t know what any of this does,” she murmured after a minute.

“You don’t have to,” Natasha replied. “You just have to know what it isn’t.”

Wendy glanced up.

“That’s not a comm,” Natasha said, pointing to a knuckled black ring caught on a bundled wire. “It’s a trigger loop. Doesn’t belong in here.”

Wendy carefully set it aside.

She kept working. No instructions came after that. Just soft, companionable silence. It wasn’t obtrusive, nor did it buzz in her ears.

Eventually, Wendy started making small piles. Coiled cords on one side. Earbuds and comms buds in another. Anything that looked sharp or broken went up by the latch. She wondered why they filled the box with so much junk. Maybe they were tired, too.

Natasha didn’t say anything, but her pace matched Wendy’s. Steady. Deliberate. Efficient.

It didn’t take long before the chaos inside the case began to take shape.

After a while, Wendy said, “You’re good at this.”

Natasha arched a brow without looking up. “Which part?”

“This.” Wendy gestured vaguely between them. “The quiet kind of helping.”

Natasha looked at her for a beat, then resumed untangling a final loop of wire. “That surprise you?”

“Yeah.” Wendy gave the smallest smile, just at the corners of her mouth. “It’s not like any of the things I read about the Black Widow talked about how she sorted her closet or her tac boxes.”

Natasha snorted, a smile bending her lips. “Nice to know I’ve still got a few secrets left.”

The floor beneath them vibrated, an extra rumble from footsteps approaching them from the cabin. Tony appeared in the galley entrance.

“I see the world’s most dysfunctional puzzle is coming together nicely,” he said dryly, but there was a glint of amusement in his eyes as he caught sight of the wires, earbuds, and cables strewn across the floor.

Natasha leaned back on her heels, glancing up at him. “You know, for someone who’s all about the tech, you don’t know the first thing about organizing it.”

Tony dropped to a crouch beside them, shaking his head with a mock-somber expression. “Guilty as charged.” He reached into the case, picking up a pair of tangled comms and examining them like they were the reason for the mess. “But at least I didn’t forget anything… I’m 89 percent sure.”

Wendy, without thinking, gave a half-hearted chuckle. It felt good to let it out, even if it was just a small sound.

Tony smiled at her. “Where was my invitation to the party?”

“You didn’t get one,” Natasha replied, tapping a finger on one of the cords, signaling they were almost done. “But I have a feeling we’ll need you to check the equipment after we’re done. A quick diagnostics run.”

Tony’s grin widened. “Ah, so now I’m the tech support. Nice. No more saving the world, just sorting through wires.” He sighed dramatically but didn’t make a move to leave.

Wendy’s fingers paused on a blue earpiece, its wire looped tight around a cracked plastic clip. In the low light, she noticed subtle scratch marks on the back. She set it in the comms pile, her thumb brushing the seam of her sleeve. Pinch. Twist. Release. The motion was quieter now, less desperate. Natasha’s presence made the air feel less dry when she breathed.

“Diagnostics,” she murmured, half to herself. “Did you pack things without checking them first?”

Tony tilted his head, something catching light behind his eyes. “We had limited time. I decided to check it en route. Poke it, see if it screams. If it doesn’t, you’re golden. If it does, you’re me at 3 a.m. with a soldering iron.”

Natasha snorted again, coiling a final red wire into a neat loop. “Don’t listen to him. He’s inflating his planning skills.”

Wendy nodded slowly. Her pile was smaller than Natasha’s, but it was orderly. The trigger loop sat alone by the latch, its black curve stark against the steel. She didn’t touch it again.

They started returning the items back into the box, Tony standing. He opened one, two, three, four cabinets before a hushed “What are you doing?” slipped from Natasha’s lips. 

He had paused, staring inside the cabinet she knew held the obituary. The man had stilled, hand still on the door. “Nothing of importance.”

The plane’s hum shifted, a low dip in pitch. Scully’s voice crackled over the intercom, flat as the tarmac they’d left. “Dropping to twelve hundred. Refuel in Hallock, twenty minutes. Don’t touch my thermoses.”

With the case sorted and closed, the three made their way back to their seats for touchdown.

Clint, still sprawled in his jump seat, cracked open an eye. “He’s got a thing about his coffee. Don’t test him.”

Natasha nodded, closing the comms case with a soft click. “Scully knows the drill. Filling up in Hallock means we won’t have to stop once in Canadian airspace.”

Tony leaned back in his seat. “Noted.”

Wendy’s gaze flicked to the window. Darkness pressed against the glass, broken only by a faint red blink from the wing. The barest hint of morning light was failing to break through the clouds, carrying heavy snow soon to fall. Her knee twitched, wanting to tap the bin again, but she pressed her boot flat.

The cabin rocked gently as the plane descended. Wendy’s ears popped again, sharper this time. She swallowed, gripping the water bottle. The plastic crinkled under her fingers, louder than it should’ve been.

“Speaking of Scully,” Tony said, turning sharply to Clint. His face was different now, something keen and narrowed. “Clint, you wanna fill us in on your pal’s rap sheet before we’re all cozy over the border?”

Clint’s head tilted, not quite turning. “Thought I did. He’s solid. Saved my ass in Kabul, ’05. You want references, ask Fury.”

“Solid’s great and all,” Tony said, voice low but sharp. “But you conveniently leaving out the fact that he’s a convicted con? Less great. Especially with my kid on board.”

Wendy’s fingers stilled on the bottle. Her eyes flicked to Clint, then Tony. Nobody moved.

Steve turned fully, facing Clint. “What is he talking about?”

Clint glanced at Steve before focusing again on the window. “When’d you hear that?”

“In the galley,” Tony commented, eyes still locked on the archer. “There’s an obituary for Jeff Scully pinned to the wall. Maine, 2006. It was on the news.”

Clint scoffed, a reflection of a smirk gracing his lips. “Wow, Stark. Didn’t think you’d be able to remember that far back through all the hangovers. Was that the year you threw a New Year's Party in March?”

Wendy’s spine felt cold, and it had nothing to do with the weather outside.

“Clint,” Steve said shortly. Demanding.

Clint exhaled through his nose, slowly. “It’s not what you think.”

“Then tell me what to think, Barton,” Tony said, low and blunt against the rumble of the plane. “Because from where I’m sitting—with my kid on board—a murder charge doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

“James was a soldier, not a saint,” Clint said. His voice remained steady and empty, staring out the window. “His brother was an addict. Attacked him in a stupor. He reacted. Did his time, moved on. You wanna bench him now, good luck finding another pilot who’ll fly us no questions asked.”

“He’s safe,” Natasha confirmed quietly. “I wouldn’t have agreed otherwise.”

Steve’s jaw tightened, his glove creaking as he gripped the armrest. “You should’ve told us sooner. All of us.”

Clint didn’t turn. “Didn’t think it’d matter. You don’t trust me by now, that’s on you.”

It was almost funny how quickly tension could choke out the air. Tony’s eyes flicked to Wendy, quick and fleeting. She met his gaze, then dropped hers to the comms box in her lap. Her thumb pressed the seam of her sleeve—pinch, twist, release. 

Scully’s hands flashed in her mind: callused, steady on the yoke, no tremor felt through the ascent. She’d seen them when he opened the hatch. There weren’t any obvious signs he was more than just a pilot. 

But she’d already learned that lesson before: anyone could be more than they say. 

The stop in Hallock was a blur. A strip of asphalt dusted with snow, smaller than the first airstrip, hemmed by pines that leaned under the wind. A fuel truck idled, its driver a shadow in a parka, head down. Scully handled the cash exchange, his canvas coat flapping as he crossed the tarmac. The team stayed strapped in, breath fogging in the cold that slipped through the open hatch. Wendy counted the seconds the fuel hose emptied into the tank—eighty-seven. Scully’s boots crunched back aboard. He nodded to Clint, nothing more.

The hatch shut with a pressurized hiss, and the cabin sealed itself back into motion. Wendy felt the shift in her bones before it even hit the engines—something about the silence before takeoff, the slight pressurized hold of stillness.

Tony tugged his seatbelt back on with a sigh, leaning his head against the cushion. “Alright, kids. If anyone’s got beauty sleep left to cash in, now’s the time.”

Clint was already slumped again. Steve stretched, spine popping, and gave a pointed look toward Natasha. “We’ve got maybe three hours before we’re back in the field. Use them.”

Natasha didn’t argue. Just tipped her head against the wall, eyes half-closed already.

Tony nudged Wendy’s boot with his. “You too, kid. You’ll want your brain firing on more than fumes.”

She nodded. Quiet. Too quick.

The plane started to move. A gentle reverse, then they were taxiing. Lights passed like ghosts along the window glass, one every few seconds. Runway lights. Not stars.

She folded her arms tightly against her chest.

The engines rose, and with them, the pitch behind her ribs.

That same familiar press.

Then the push—pronounced and physical. 

The wheels lifted. The trees dropped away.

They were in the air.

Tony’s breathing shifted first. A little heavier. Not quite asleep, but on the edge of it. Natasha didn’t move. Neither did Steve. The lights in the cabin had dimmed automatically, just enough to keep their shapes soft in the dark.

Wendy stayed still. Her arms were still crossed. Her hands were tucked close. Her eyes were open.

She didn’t move toward the bin.

She didn’t tap.

She didn’t even blink much.

The hum of the plane softened to a steady pulse.

But the dark inside pressed closer than the dark outside.

She could hear the wind against the hull, thin and whistling. She could hear the shuffle of Steve’s boots as he settled into a more comfortable position. The slow inhale-exhale of Clint, two seats across and over.

She could hear the memory of a breath that wasn’t hers.

And she didn’t close her eyes.

She wasn’t afraid of the dark. Not exactly. She just didn’t trust it to stay empty.

And no one like her sleeps with the lights off if they can help it.

Chapter Text

Bruce woke up cold.

The kind of cold that made your breath feel like glass on the way out, and worse on the way back in. At least it was warmer inside than outside, where it was -18, maybe -20 Fahrenheit. He hadn’t checked the outdoor sensor yet, but the floorboards under his socks confirmed it: cold enough to keep the pipes frozen solid. Cold enough that even the dog was curled up beneath the stove instead of her usual spot at the door.

He’d fallen asleep on the couch again. He wasn’t sure when. He still had a pen tucked behind his ear and three different books open across the coffee table—two physics journals and a murder mystery he didn’t remember picking up.

The solar inverter light blinked amber. Overnight draw had been high again. Too many devices left running. He needed to reprogram the lab heaters. Again.

Coffee. Yes. Coffee first.

Then: diagnostics, heater, passive perimeter check. Maybe eggs. Maybe not.

He stood too quickly and had to steady himself on the armrest. Not dizzy. Just… recalibrating. He grabbed his notebook on instinct and flipped back to yesterday’s margin notes. He’d written something—something good—between power cycles.

Gamma thresholds remain stable below –12°C. No notable cortical slippage in stress-state simulation.

That was encouraging. Possibly. If it was real. He squinted at his own handwriting and frowned. It looked like he’d been writing left-handed again.

That wasn’t encouraging.

He muttered, “Right. Coffee.”

He shuffled into the kitchenette, boots half-laced. His coat was still hanging off the back of a chair. The ceramic mug from Calcutta—chipped at the rim—was where he’d left it. Next to the French press, water was already measured in the kettle, grounds prepped in the filter like a gift from Yesterday Bruce. 

Sometimes he really came through.

He flipped the switch and leaned his hip against the counter, watching the frost snake down the windowpanes. The sun wouldn’t clear the trees for another hour, but it was technically morning. 

January morning in Manitoba. Cold. Bright. Empty.

Behind him, the dog huffed. Not a bark, but a note of awareness. Bruce glanced at her. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at the door.

“Just wind,” he said. But he checked the camera monitor anyway.

Nothing.

He poured the boiling water and set the timer for four minutes. Not three. Not five. Four was safest. Always had been.

He rubbed his eyes. His fingertips smelled faintly like solder. He’d been rewiring something—what was it? He scanned the notes again. Something about a dampener relay. Or a shielding loop. Maybe both. Didn’t matter. He’d fix it again later. Coffee first.

Four minutes passed. The press clicked. He poured the first cup and took a slow sip. It tasted like heat and almost-burnt earth. Not good. But real.

For the moment, everything was still. No alerts. No calls. No reasons to run.

He let himself breathe like that was allowed.

Of course, then the phone rang.

He startled harder than he meant to—coffee sloshed up the side of the mug and kissed the edge of his thumb. Too hot. He hissed through his teeth and set the cup down.

At first, he was just volunteering—keeping his head down, helping where he could, hiding behind glasses and a beard and an old parka. But people talk in towns like that. Especially when someone’s hands don’t shake when stitching up a wound or when they know how to build a sterilizer from scratch. Eventually, the clinic stopped calling the city for backup and started calling the cabin.

Bruce never put up a sign. But the number of the phone on the wall made its rounds. People with busted knees, bronchitis, frostbite, broken bones—he could handle most of it. The town learned to trust the man up by the ridge, even if they didn’t ask too many questions. 

They respected his distance. They know not to bring crowds. But when something’s urgent—really urgent—they call. 

The landline had a piercing ring that echoed off the walls. Not a number he recognized, but local. Which, in Manitoba, meant somewhere within a hundred miles.

He answered on the fourth ring.

“Dr. Robert,” said a woman’s voice, chipper in a way only people who’d been awake since five could manage. 

He flinched, but didn’t correct her. He never did.

Being hugged by a little girl who tore her ACL in a sledding accident helped take the sting out of the name.

“Sorry to call early—Linda from the clinic. We’ve got a walk-in. Ice fishing mishap. Looks like a clean break, but he won’t let anyone else touch it. Says he’ll wait for the good doctor.”

Bruce closed his eyes briefly. He didn’t sigh, exactly. But he did pause. “How bad’s the swelling?”

“Manageable. His pride’s worse than the leg.”

That was usually the case.

“Alright,” Bruce said. “Tell him to sit tight. I’ll be there in twenty.” On second thought, he glanced out the window to the Jeep Wrangler buried under a foot of snow. “Make that an hour.”

“Copy that, Doc. Drive safe.”

She hung up without waiting for a goodbye. She never did. Efficient woman.

Bruce hung up the phone and rubbed a hand down his face. The heat from the coffee had already faded from his thumb. He reached for the rest of it and took a longer sip, letting the bitter warmth settle.

“Alright,” he muttered. “Let’s go fix someone else today.”

He didn’t speak out loud often, but the dog responded anyway. She lifted her head from beneath the stove and gave him a slow blink, followed by a sigh that sounded almost judgmental.

“I know. It’s early.”

She didn’t move until he reached for his coat. Then she stood, stretched long and low, and trotted over without being called. The creature was more like a cat than a dog. Bruce stepped aside to let her out the door first. The snow came up past her chest, but she didn’t seem to mind. She never did.

She didn’t belong to anyone, as far as he could tell. No collar, no tags, no chip when he’d checked. But she showed up at the cabin two weeks ago—half-starved, limping, ribs like fence posts—and had started coming back. Not every day. Not even most days. Just enough that Bruce started leaving out food, even at the risk of attracting polar bears. Just enough that she sometimes stayed through the night, curled at the back door like a living shadow.

He’d tried calling her Dog, but that didn’t stick. She ignored it completely.

Eventually, he settled on Alder. Not because she came to it—she didn’t—but because it fit. Quiet. Strong. Local.

He pulled on his layers mechanically: thermal undershirt, flannel, sweater, parka. Wool socks. Snow pants. Scarf. Gloves. Thicker gloves in the Jeep. The wind howled past the eaves like a warning, but it was just another beautiful morning in Manitoba.

“Watch for bears,” he told Alder as she leapt into the passenger seat.

She gave a single, short whuff.

He took that as agreement.

The Jeep was already complaining before he turned the key. The battery wasn’t thrilled with the temperature. Neither was the transmission. But after a few stubborn seconds, the engine caught. Bruce let it idle while he scraped the windshield and cleared enough snow off the hood to see.

The drive into town would take longer than usual.

The roads wouldn’t be a problem—the town was small, but their snow plows were very efficient. No, he wouldn’t be running a risk of slippery roads, but the drop in temperature meant it was cold enough that the radio might start working again. And if the radio started working, someone might say something worth hearing. He’d need to be careful. 

The last time he heard news about New York, it had ruined his whole week.

He pulled the scarf over his mouth and turned the heat up just enough to keep the windshield from fogging.

Alder curled up in the passenger seat, ears alert, watching the tree line.

“Just a break,” he said, like it might stay that simple. “Just a quick patch job.”

He wasn’t sure if he meant the leg or the day ahead.

He flicked on the radio halfway down the ridge.

Static. Then a burst of fiddle. Then more static.

He clicked over to another frequency. Someone talking about grain subsidies. He clicked again. Christian rock. Again. A French-Canadian call-in show where someone was crying in a way that made Bruce reflexively tense.

One more scan brought him to the weather report—somewhere north of Churchill, the wind chill had dropped past -40. The broadcaster sounded far too cheerful about it.

He let that one play for a while, if only because it was the least distressing option.

No mention of Stark. No mention of S.H.I.E.L.D. or the other guy. No news on anything louder than the weather.

Good.

Maybe the world could hold its breath one more day.

The drive to town passed in familiar quiet. Snow-covered fields gave way to buildings like patchwork—post office, diner, gas station, pharmacy, clinic. One intersection. Two stop signs. 

Obviously, that was an exaggeration, but it was small. Remote.

A mural in faded paint across the side of the general store. The population sign still read 867, but Bruce knew that was outdated.

He parked around the side of the clinic, in his usual spot. Alder waited for permission before hopping out. She didn’t need a leash. She never wandered. She was surprisingly well-trained for a dog that never responded to any name.

Inside, the warmth hit him like a physical thing—dry, overheated, faintly antiseptic. Someone had made coffee. Someone had also been in the middle of making toast, judging by the smell of bread just past edible. He could smell the heated metal, too, sharp in his nose.

And music.

He recognized it the moment the guitar kicked in.

“Ring my friend, I said you’d call… Doctor Robert…”

Bruce sighed through his nose. “Seriously?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Linda from behind the desk, not even trying to hide her grin. “It was his idea.”

She thumbed toward the exam room. The door was ajar. Bruce caught a glimpse of a teenage boy in a fishing parka with a rapidly ballooning knee.

Bruce grumbled under his breath but couldn’t help the faint curve of his lips as he walked past Linda’s desk. He'd never fully understood how the joke had started, but it had somehow become a bit of a fixture in this small town’s strange rhythm. A joke, yes, but... one he didn’t mind too much.

Linda wasn’t fazed by his usual reluctance. She had a knack for finding the humor in his awkwardness, and as far as he could tell, she was one of the few people who respected his space without pushing too hard.

He ducked into Exam Room A. The boy, maybe sixteen, was trying to keep his leg elevated on a pillow. His knee was swollen but didn’t look fully broken, just fractured, and he was grimacing, clearly uncomfortable but also clearly trying to act tough. Typical .

The boy looked up and immediately relaxed. “Hey, Doc.”

Bruce nodded. “Tell me how dumb this was from one to ten.”

The kid grinned, sheepishly. “Twelve.”

“Good. Honesty’s the first step toward recovery.”

Bruce squatted in front of the kid, checking the leg with practiced precision. "How long you been walking on this?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

The boy winced. “Uh, about half an hour… didn’t think it was that bad.”

“No, you didn’t. But it is,” Bruce replied, already pulling out a syringe. “Alright, I’m gonna give you a local to help with the pain. This isn’t gonna be fun.”

As Bruce prepped the injection, Alder settled down in the corner of the room, laying her head on her paws, watching the proceedings with her usual calmness. She’d never flinched at needles, or much of anything else, for that matter.

The boy’s face tightened as the needle sank in. Bruce kept his tone level, trying to ease the discomfort with his usual dry calm. “Don’t worry. You’ll be able to walk out of here in about an hour. If you let me work.”

He wasn’t really known for his bedside manner, if he was being honest.

“Yeah, yeah,” the boy grumbled, but Bruce could see the relief in his eyes.

Linda popped her head into the doorway, still smiling. “You need anything, Doc?”

“Yeah, toss the toaster in the garbage,” Bruce muttered without looking up.

Linda snorted. “Got it. You want anything while you’re at it?”

“Quiet,” he muttered back. “I’m working.”

“I’m just saying,” she smirked, “your fan club’s getting pretty loud in here. It’s practically a concert in the waiting room.”

“Linda, I’m not really Doctor Robert ,” he said, pressing his fingers into the boy’s knee to wrap it. “I’m just the guy who’s good at fixing things.”

“Well,” she said, tapping the desk outside the room with a gentle rhythm, “at least someone’s fixing something. The clinic’s still not running without you, you know.”

“I can’t stay forever,” Bruce said absently, before glancing over at her. “What would you do if I left?”

Linda raised her eyebrows. “Well, for one, I’d probably make you pay me for all the free coffee.”

Bruce couldn’t help but laugh a little at that.

He finished with the boy’s knee, bandaging it up with efficiency, but his thoughts wandered. His real thoughts, the ones he couldn’t voice here. The idea of sticking around for good was... unsettling. But he wasn’t ready to leave either.

The clinic was small, but it was a lifeline. To Linda. To the town. To him. Maybe he’d never fully understand why he kept coming back, why he kept patching things up and pretending it all was just fine—but in some small way, it now felt like the only place he could safely exist.

After all, he wasn’t Doctor Robert. He wasn’t the man they thought he was. He just liked being needed. And right now, that was enough.

“Well, thanks, Doc,” the boy said, standing awkwardly and testing his weight on the knee. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Bruce replied. “Next time, listen to your father about the ice fishing. Stop going alone.”

The boy gave him a sheepish grin, and Bruce stood, ducking out of the room, his back to Linda and the amused grin she was undoubtedly wearing.

Bruce made his way to the break room, where Linda stood at the counter pouring water into the battered clinic kettle. The space had settled into its late-morning hush—just the soft murmur of the water heater and the distant creak of pine beams contracting in the cold.

Alder padded over and leaned against Bruce’s shin, tail giving a slow wag.

“Quiet morning,” Linda said, glancing up. “You’re not usually this quiet.”

Bruce accepted the mug she handed him, warm but chipped along the rim. “Still figuring out the routine,” he said, voice low.

Linda arched an eyebrow. “You’ve been here almost two months. You’re doing fine.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said. He didn’t sound convinced. “Just not really used to things staying quiet this long.”

She hummed, moving back to the counter. “Most people would call that peace.”

Bruce didn’t answer.

He stood near the wall, sipping coffee that was far too strong. The bitterness grounded him. Focused his senses. Outside the window, frost clung to the corners of the glass. There were no cars. No engines. No noise, except for the wind and the hum of the clinic's fridge compressor.

Two months.

Two months of silence that didn’t feel earned. Two months of pretending this version of life could stick, that he could build something like stability out of scavenged supplies and a fake name. That he wasn’t one bad night away from losing everything again.

They called him Dr. Robert because that’s what the paper said, and they didn’t ask. He didn’t correct them. He never corrected anyone anymore. They just played that silly song, equating him to a magic healer.

They didn’t know what he was capable of.

The mug was too warm in his hands. His palms started to sweat, so he set it down on the counter and rubbed his thumb against the seam of his flannel cuff.

He could feel it creeping in again. That tight feeling behind his ribs. Not panic—not yet. Just some vague echo of it. Familiar. Intrusive.

Sometimes, he wondered if this version of him—the one who stitched wounds and made house calls and fixed broken radios when asked nicely—was just a mask that fit better than the others. Not real. Just quieter.

The silence felt heavier today.

Then came the knock. Light. Polite. Like whoever it was didn’t want to interrupt too hard.

Bruce didn’t move at first.

Linda called from the front, voice just loud enough to carry. “Doc? You’ve got a walk-in.”

Another pause. Then: “Couple of ’em, actually. I wasn’t kidding about the fan club.”

He blinked. Nodded, mostly to himself, and peeled his hand away from the cuff. The fabric had bunched slightly from where his thumb had worried it loose.

Alder lifted her head but didn’t move from her new spot in the corner.

Bruce stepped into the hall, boots quiet on the scuffed linoleum. The waiting room wasn’t full—not really—but in a town this size, four people might as well have been a parade. A man he didn’t recognize sat hunched with one hand pressed to his ribs. A mother with a flushed toddler in her lap gave him a hopeful smile. An older woman dabbed at her nose with a tissue. No one looked panicked. Just… waiting.

They always waited for him.

Linda glanced over from her chair behind the desk. “Rough morning,” she said softly.

Bruce nodded once. “I’ll start with the kid.”

The mother stood, adjusting her grip on the toddler’s blanket as she followed Bruce back toward Exam Room A. He held the door open, waited until they were settled, and went to wash his hands. The sink squeaked quietly. Cold water, always a second behind the hot.

Behind him, the child gave a wheezy cough. The mother murmured an apology like it were her fault.

Bruce turned, drying his hands on a threadbare towel. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said.

She gave a thin smile. “Just didn’t want to make a scene.”

Bruce crouched beside the exam table, careful with his tone. “He’s running warm?”

“Yeah. Started last night. Just real fussy. Wouldn’t eat.”

Bruce nodded, pulling the stethoscope from around his neck. “Alright, little man. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

The child blinked up at him—eyes glassy, but curious.

It was easier like this. One breath at a time. One symptom. One cause. One fix.

But even as he worked—measuring, checking, listening—he felt it pressing in again. That quiet knowledge underneath everything:

He couldn’t stay.

He wasn’t the miracle man they thought he was.

He never would be.

The truck rumbled through the snow-covered streets of Churchill, a slow crawl through a town that seemed frozen in time. The buildings here were small, squat, and practical—nothing too flashy, just places where people lived and worked, tucked in against the cold. It wasn’t anything like New York, or even the small towns Wendy had seen in her old life. Here, everything felt like it had been compressed by the weight of isolation, the endless snow that surrounded them like a cold blanket.

She kept her eyes on the road ahead, watching as the town began to fade, the buildings thinning out. They were nearing their destination—the clinic, the place where they’d find Dr. Banner.

Tony’s voice crackled through the comms in her ear and echoed in the car. 

“Remember the plan. We stick to the basics. Nothing flashy. Nothing complicated.” She could hear the faintest edge of tension in his voice, though he masked it well. The longer they were in the field, the more the pressure seemed to build. This wasn’t just about finding the doctor—it was about doing it without being found.

Wendy repeated the details in her head, the rhythm of the plan settling in like a mantra.

Approach the clinic. Check for any signs of surveillance. Make contact with Dr. Banner. See if he’ll talk. If things go sideways, we pull back.

She exhaled, eyes scanning the quiet town ahead. Simple. Clean. And fast.

They would be in and out. That was the goal. But nothing ever went as planned, not in her experience.

Clint would be watching from the rooftop across the street, his sharp eyes and steady hands making him their eyes in the sky. If anything went wrong, he’d be the first to see it. He’d already been dropped off in their first pass through town. Wendy could picture him now—leaning into his rifle scope, his focus absolute, his hands stationary. He’d be ready, waiting for the signal, waiting for the right moment to act. If that moment ever came.

Steve would be with the car, parked further down the street, the engine quietly running in case they needed to make a fast exit. It was a perfect setup—except for one thing.

She wasn’t sure what she could offer to the plan at this point.

Her fingers gripped the door handle, the cold biting through her gloves. Focus . She repeated the word in her mind. You’ve got this. Just keep it together.

Her gaze flicked to Natasha. The Black Widow was already processing the situation, calm and detached, her eyes scanning the clinic in the distance as if she’d done this a thousand times before. The plan was clear in her mind, as it was in Tony’s. Keep it simple, keep it clean.

They would approach the clinic together. Tony would lead, as always—his presence a shield, a distraction, the first face Banner would see. Wendy and Natasha would be behind him, each step taken with precision. They couldn’t afford to make a misstep. They couldn’t afford to be seen as a threat. They needed the Doctor to trust them, to listen. They needed to find out if he was willing to come with them, to help them with whatever was coming next.

The comms crackled again, and Steve’s voice carried through. “Wendy. Stick close to Tony. Let’s keep it clean. Don’t overthink it. We’re just here to talk.”

She didn’t respond, just nodded to herself. He was right. She couldn’t overthink it. But the cold knot of fear in her chest told her it wouldn’t be as easy as Tony made it sound.

God, pull it together. This isn’t your first mission .

It took physically shaking her head and straightening her spine to clear her mind.

The truck slowed as they neared the clinic; the building stood alone against the stark white snow. It looked even smaller up close, a simple structure with a faded sign. The kind of place you’d find in a small town where nobody asked too many questions, but everyone was nosy.

Tony’s voice came through the comms again. “Alright, team. Let’s go. Clint, eyes on the door. Steve, stay by the car. We’ll handle the talking.”

Wendy felt her heart beat in time with the words. She exhaled through her nose, doing her best to ignore the tightness in her chest. She could do this. They were here to find Doctor Banner—nothing more, nothing less.

They parked a few blocks down, the snow crunched beneath their boots as they moved quickly through the empty streets, the cold sharp enough to make her face sting.

As they reached the clinic, she pulled her parka tighter around her, trying to block out the rest of the world. It was just her, Tony, and Natasha now. The clinic ahead, its single front door standing silent in the snow.

She couldn’t stop her thoughts from racing. Was he in there? Was he going to be happy to see the people he fought alongside? Would he be willing to trust them? Or would they have to drag him out?

Tony’s hand brushed her shoulder, just briefly. “You alright?”

She nodded, not trusting her voice to respond.

Just breathe. That’s all she needed to do. Just breathe.

And then they were there, standing in front of the door, Natasha moving to the side just enough to let Tony lead the way.

The door dinged a cheerful little sound when it opened. Inside, there were only two people: a woman sat at the front desk wearing pink scrubs, and an older woman rested in the waiting room, eyes closed, clutching a tissue.

The woman behind the desk—her nametag read Linda—looked up at them with a friendly smile. Deep smile lines creased the sides of her face, adding depth to the kindness in her eyes.

“Well, you lot seem a long way from home,” she said, her tone warm.

“Yes,” Natasha replied smoothly, her arm slipping casually around Wendy’s shoulder. Her gentle smile transformed her appearance significantly. It was like standing next to a stranger. “We arrived a couple of days ago to see the polar bears, but our daughter’s been complaining about headaches since we got here.”

Tony, pulled out of his silent trance, blinked a few times, shaking himself back to the present. “Right. Yes, we wanted to make sure it’s nothing too serious.”

Linda smiled sweetly, not missing a beat. “Well, that certainly won’t do. Let’s get you sorted.” She slid a clipboard from beneath the desk, handing over a stack of forms. “Since you’re new to us, I’ll just need you to sign this release form and give me any relevant medical history you can think of.”

Natasha took the clipboard with a nod of thanks, and together, they moved to the waiting area. Wendy found herself tucked between Natasha and Tony, a slight, subtle pressure on either side.

They sat down in one of the mismatched chairs that lined the wall, the fluorescent lights humming overhead. Tony immediately took the clipboard from Natasha, the action mechanical, as though he had done it a hundred times before.

For a moment, the only sound was the rustle of paper as he flipped through the forms, clearly checking for something. Then, almost absentmindedly, he asked, “Do you have any allergies? Or, uh, a history of frequent headaches?”

Wendy felt a flicker of unease in her chest, but she kept her voice neutral. “It’s just a cover,” she murmured quietly, enough for Tony to hear, but not loud enough to draw attention.

Tony glanced at her, his expression softening just a fraction. “Right, right. But I should probably know these things anyway,” he said, a slight chuckle in his voice. “You know, being your dad and all.”

The words hung in the air for a moment, both of them still. Wendy’s heart skipped, just the faintest flutter of surprise. She hadn’t expected him to say it out loud, not like this, not in front of anyone. The way his voice caught on the last part, like he’d tested it on his tongue and was seeing how it felt.

He had called himself her dad.

She swallowed, the words caught in her throat, but she said nothing. Instead, she focused on the soft rustling of the forms in Tony’s hands, the clicking of his pen as he filled them out. Her fingers curled into the smooth fabric of her parka, grounding herself in the now.

“Alright,” Tony said, returning his attention to the forms. His voice was a touch louder now, not trying to hide his words. “We’ll get this over with quickly. Just want to make sure you’re all set, kiddo. So, any history of smoking?”

Her nose wrinkled in distaste. “Definitely not.”

Tony nodded, in what she guessed was approval. Then:

“I have a history of headaches,” she whispered. “Migraines.”

Tony paused, his pen hovering just above the page. Slowly, he looked up at her—not surprised, exactly, but something softer. Acknowledging.

“Okay,” he said gently, and wrote it down.

Natasha didn’t say anything, but Wendy felt her shift slightly beside her. A quiet recalibration. Not just of the cover story, but of the whole situation. It wasn’t part of the plan. But Natasha noticed it anyway. Of course she did.

It hit her then, slightly, that she was sitting next to her father . 

Wendy didn’t look at either of them, just stared straight ahead at the generic health posters on the wall, the kind with smiling families and awkward slogans. One showed a child holding a teddy bear and smiling at a nurse. The caption read: Your Health is Our Priority.

The door next to the front desk opened, and an elderly man walked out, stiff. He waved awkwardly at Linda, who responded with a, “You take care now, Mr. Tillman!”

“Send the next one in, Linda,” a voice carried from the examination room. She felt the way Tony stiffened next to her, and how Natasha forcefully didn’t react.

That’s him.

She was relieved, of course. He was safe. Out of HYDRA’s clutches.

“Voice confirmation,” Clint’s voice came through the earpiece.

He was here. He was safe. He wasn’t dead or locked in some underground cell. He was… here. Behind a door. On the other side of the hallway. Calling for the next patient, just like today was any other day. 

The older woman shuffled to the examination room, closing the door behind her.

Tony didn’t speak right away. He just finished the line he’d been writing—slow, deliberate pen strokes like he was thinking through each one. Then he cleared his throat.

“Any allergies?” he asked, glancing sideways at her. His voice was softer again, pulled back into the quiet.

“Strawberries.”

He nodded. Checked a box. Then paused. “Strawberries?”

Wendy nodded. He made an affirming sound, like he’d had some kind of realisation, then moved on.

“On any current medications?”

“No.”

“Have you been hospitalized in the past year?”

“Not officially.”

That made him huff, just under his breath. Not quite a laugh.

She didn’t take it back.

Natasha leaned slightly to look over his shoulder, like she was checking his progress. “Just stick to what Linda wants to see,” she murmured, the hint of a smile in her voice.

Tony scratched something out. “Fine. Officially, then—no hospitalizations.”

The pen clicked as he flipped the page. Wendy could tell he wasn’t rushing, but he wasn’t dragging it out either. He was giving her time to catch her breath. Or maybe buying some for himself.

“Emergency contact?”

He hesitated.

Wendy didn’t.

“I mean—you, I guess,” she said, flatly.

Something flickered across his face—sharp, startled, and then quickly buried. 

“Right.” He nodded, writing it down with a careful hand.

Natasha didn’t speak, but Wendy felt her shift again. 

The form was almost finished. Just a couple of boxes left.

“You want to list any chronic conditions?” Tony asked.

Wendy glanced at the poster again. The kid with the teddy bear hadn’t moved, of course. But it still felt like someone was watching.

“Just the migraines, I think,” she said.

Tony nodded again and filled in the last section.

“All set,” he said, exhaling a little like it took more effort than it should’ve. He handed the clipboard back to Natasha without looking at her.

Linda looked up as Natasha stood to return it, and smiled at all three of them. “Thank you, sweetheart. Dr. Robert should be ready for you any moment.” Then, she opened the door to give the form to—Dr. Robert.

There was a pause—just long enough for the silence to stretch too tight—before Clint’s voice cut in through the earpieces, dry as ever:

“Just remember, if he offers candy, ask for the sealed kind. We’re not complete animals.”

Tony let out a short huff that could’ve been a laugh. Natasha’s mouth twitched, almost a smile.

Wendy remained motionless.

She was staring at the hallway door again—the one marked Exam Room A. The one she was supposed to go through. To meet the doctor. To complete the cover story.

Just her.

No , she thought. She wouldn’t be alone. That wasn’t the plan.

Her body felt otherwise.

Her hands curled against her legs. She didn’t even realize it until her nails dug into the fabric, through the layers. Her pulse had jumped without warning, a thrum behind her ears. She wasn’t going to be touched, wasn’t going to be examined—but it didn’t matter. Her brain was already reacting. Small room. Unknown man. Closed door. A title in front of a name.

Tony turned his head, subtle but sharp. His smile faded.

Natasha noticed a beat later. She shifted beside Wendy, angled her body slightly to intercept whatever was coming.

Even Linda, behind the desk, caught it. Her tone softened.

“It’s alright, sweetheart. Dr. Robert’s very kind. You’re in good hands.”

Wendy flinched.

It was small. Tight.

She didn’t want to be in anyone’s hands.

She didn’t want kindness if it came from behind a door she couldn’t open herself.

Natasha’s hand settled gently over Wendy’s knee. A signal. A tether. She stayed silent, and her fingers just rested on her leg, making herself known.

Tony leaned forward slightly, eyes on Wendy. His voice was low, just for her.

“You don’t have to go in alone. Not for this.”

Wendy didn’t nod right away. But she blinked. Took a breath. And then gave the smallest tilt of her head.

Natasha looked toward Linda. “She’s not comfortable going in without family,” she said, polite but final.

Linda nodded. No resistance. “That’s just fine, hon. Dr. Robert’s flexible.”

It was just a mission, a cover, but was it really like this? Having a family?

The door opened again. The woman from earlier stepped out, holding a pamphlet and smiling too hard. Her cheeks were blotchy.

“Dr. Robert’s ready for you,” Linda said.

Wendy stood.

So did Natasha and Tony, flanking her without ceremony.

Wendy stepped forward, her limbs moving before her brain fully agreed. But she didn’t falter. She felt the quiet thud of Tony and Natasha behind her, close enough to sense but not crowding. 

The walk was shorter than it had seemed. The door to Exam Room A stood open now, with a strip of fluorescent light bleeding out over the tiled floor like a crack in the ceiling. Waiting.

She passed through it.

The room was warm. Not unpleasantly so—just occupied. Lived in. A whiteboard near the counter bore hand-drawn reminders to wash hands, drink water, and be kind. A folded flannel jacket was hung neatly over a hook in the corner. A beat-up medical bag sat next to the exam table, zipped and ready to go.

And the man in the room—Dr. Robert, Dr. Bruce Banner —was facing away from them, one hand on the counter, the other adjusting a pair of reading glasses as he scanned a clipboard.

“The migraines are unusual for someone this young,” he said mildly, speaking to the paper, not to them. “But not unheard of. Family history?”

He turned.

And the moment froze.

Wendy didn’t know him. But she saw it. The way his breath caught. The way his face—not just his body, but something deeper—seized up. Like he’d opened a door and found a ghost waiting.

Tony didn’t falter.

“Hey, big guy,” he said, gently sarcastic. “Good to see you too.”

Chapter Text

Bruce didn’t move for a heartbeat after Tony’s words. He stood just inside the small exam room, one hand braced against the countertop—fingers splayed on the cool laminate—while the other hung loose at his side. The overhead fluorescents hummed, painting him in harsh white light that exaggerated the sharp lines of his face: the slight furrow between his brows, the set of his jaw as if he were chewing on unsaid words.

Wendy noted everything.

His shoulders weren’t relaxed; they were angled forward just enough to suggest he was braced for impact.

His feet were planted hip‑width apart, weight evenly balanced—ready, she thought, to slip away or stand his ground.

His eyes swept the room once—Tony, then Natasha, then her, lingering on Tony.

The room itself offered no comfort. It had a narrow exam table with its paper roll half‑torn, a vinyl stool tucked beneath it, and cabinets stamped “Sterile Supplies” with peeling edges. A single sink, its faucet still dripping, sent a soft plink‑plink echoing against the tile. The scent of antiseptic was sharp, layered over something faintly sweet—hand lotion, maybe, left behind by the last patient.

Wendy stayed where Natasha had placed her: just inside the doorway, close enough to catch Bruce’s next move but far enough back to give him space. Her boots made no sound on the linoleum. Her arms hung loose at her sides, though she felt the tension in her fingers, ready to curl into a fist if it came to that.

He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t afraid. He simply… paused as if he’d been interrupted mid‑routine and was trying to remember whether he was still at work or already off shift.

Wendy breathed in slowly, counting the seconds before he would speak. If he needed proof they meant no harm, she would give it. If he needed a warning, she would provide that, too. But for now, she watched him choose his next move, knowing that whatever came out of his mouth would decide everything that followed.

“How did you find me?”

Natasha shifted next to her. Wendy had to assume it was intentional. This situation couldn’t possibly be the one to unnerve the Black Widow, could it?

“It wasn’t easy,” she said softly, linking her fingers loosely in front of her. “You’re pretty good at flying under the radar.”

She shifted her weight, boots silent on the linoleum. The drip of the faucet marked time— plink, plink, plink —each sound sharper than the last. Her fingers brushed the seam of her hoodie sleeve, hidden in her pocket. Pinch. Twist. Release. The fabric was starting to fray, a tiny rebellion against her control. She stopped, forcing her hand still, but her pulse didn’t listen. It thrummed behind her ears, too loud in the quiet.

Bruce’s eyes flicked to Natasha, then back to Tony. “Under the radar’s the only way I stay alive,” he said, voice low and rough. “You know that, Tony.”

Tony tilted his head, a half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah, well, we’re not exactly here to blow your cover, big guy. Just need a chat. Off the grid, no strings.”

Wendy’s gaze darted to Tony, then Bruce. The words sounded easy, but they weren’t. She knew that cadence in Tony’s voice, even if it was new from his tone—light, but coiled, like a spring waiting to snap. Her stomach tightened. Was this the part where it went wrong? Where Bruce bolted, or worse, where the other guy showed up? She counted the steps to the door. Four. Maybe five. The exam table could be a barrier if she needed one.

It probably wouldn’t be very effective against the Hulk.

Bruce exhaled slowly, his shoulders dropping a fraction. “A chat,” he repeated, testing the word. 

“Well, you didn’t exactly RSVP to my last invitation,” Tony said, gesturing with an open hand, all flippant charm.

Bruce’s eyes landed on Wendy again, lingering this time. She didn’t flinch, but her fingers curled in her pocket, nails biting skin. He wasn’t scanning her like a threat—just… curious. Like she was a puzzle he hadn’t expected to find. 

“She seems a little young to be part of a group of superheroes.”

Her throat closed. She didn’t want to be seen. Not like this, not by him, not in a room that smelled like antiseptic and reminded her of choices she didn’t get to make. Natasha’s arm brushed hers, a steady pressure, grounding. Wendy forced her voice out, flat, controlled. “I’m not.”

Tony's hand came up to her shoulder blades, a soft, grounding pressure. Reflexively, she pushed her weight against the hand, using it for support. 

“You’ve missed a lot in the last few days, Green Bean,” he said. 

Bruce glanced toward the door, jaw tight. “Not here.”

He stepped past them and opened the door without another word. Wendy didn’t let herself breathe until the room was behind them.

Linda looked up from her crossword, confusion wrinkling her brow.

“Doctor Robert?” she asked. “Everything okay?”

Bruce didn’t falter; he just grabbed his coat from a hook. “I’ve got to step out for a bit. Cover if anyone shows up?”

Linda blinked. “You’re leaving? Now?”

“It’s important.”

That seemed to be enough. Linda’s mouth opened like she had more to say, but she caught a glimpse of the others behind him and closed it again. “Right. I’ll hold the fort.”

The bell over the door jingled faintly as Bruce stepped into the cold. Wendy followed, head ducked, her breath fogging in the sharp air.

Then she froze.

There was a dog.

Big, brown, and gray.

Long-legged and shaggy, it brushed past her on her left as it left the clinic. It trotted up to Bruce’s side—broad-shouldered, wolf-colored, big enough to knock her down if it wanted. Wendy’s body was locked. Breath caught. She wasn’t afraid, not in the way they’d think—but her feet refused to move.

The others didn’t notice at first—Tony was already making a quip about Manitoba hospitality—but she didn’t move. Couldn’t. Something cracked sideways in her chest.

Natasha noticed first. “Wendy?”

Tony turned just as she took a step back, posture rigid.

“It’s okay,” Bruce said, mistaking the reaction. “She’s friendly.”

Natasha had already pivoted, scanning Wendy’s face. “It’s just a dog,” she said quietly, tone careful.

Wendy didn’t answer. She wasn’t afraid. Not of the dog. That wasn’t it. It was the shape of her. The way she waited without needing a command. The way her brain flooded with old scents—wet fur, leather, pine—and the feel of a heavy head in her lap.

The dog ambled forward and pressed against her legs.

Wendy flinched. Then stood very, very still.

It wasn’t just a dog.

It was the weight of memory pressing against her ribs. A different hallway. A different dog. A handler’s voice telling her to kneel so it could learn her scent.

She didn’t move.

The wolf-dog didn’t bark or jump. Just leaned her full weight against her shins, solid and real. Her hand drifted to her fur before she even realized what she was doing. She was warm. She blinked up at her with soft, poised amber eyes, and something inside her locked down, then let go.

“What’s her name?” she asked, voice low.

“Alder,” Bruce said, watching her. “She’s not mine. But she likes my place. She also doesn’t really respond to the name, but… oh well. I could try to get her to stay here, but she probably won’t listen. She does what she wants.”

Wendy nodded once. Alder leaned harder into her legs.

Bruce unlocked the truck without comment. Natasha climbed into the passenger seat. Wendy slid into the back with Tony, Alder hopping in after her and curling up like she belonged there.

She pressed her head into her lap, heavy and warm. Wendy stared down at her.

Alder blinked up, unbothered.

“You good?” Tony asked, quietly enough that it wasn’t a push.

She nodded, one hand resting on the dog’s back.

Tony looked satisfied enough. He tapped the comm in his ear. “Rogers, Barton, we’re wheels up. We'll lose localized connection once we’re separated by 500 yards.”

Clint’s voice came through a second later, tinny in her ears. “Copy that. We’ll tail you—we’ll circle wide, heat run to your location in ten.”

“My cabin’s about twenty minutes from here now that it’s not snowing anymore,” Bruce added, eyes on the road. He didn’t have an earpiece in, so he didn’t know that he was cutting off Clint’s words.

“Then we’ll be there in thirty,” Steve said through the comms. “Message us the location. Stay safe.”

Tony leaned back in his seat with a sigh, gaze flicking to Wendy and Alder. “You make friends fast.”

She stayed quiet but kept her hand on Alder’s fur.

The truck rumbled forward, tires humming against frozen pavement. The radio remained off. Bruce didn’t say another word.

No one did.

The road flattened as they crested the final rise, not that there was much to crest. Everything out here was flat. Flat and white and blinding. The land was a frozen exhale, a breath held mid-winter, and not planning to let go anytime soon.

There were no trees. Not really. A few stubborn shrubs. The occasional windbreak near distant houses. But no trees. Not for miles.

Wendy noticed it first. Or rather, she noticed the absence. No branches. No cover. No shadows shifting in the wind. Nothing to break the horizon but sky and snow and the faint shape of a roofline ahead.

She frowned, quiet but alert.

“Where’s the forest?” she asked, more to herself than anyone else.

Bruce didn’t answer. Just kept driving.

The cabin emerged without ceremony. It didn’t rise so much as settle, low and square and half-swallowed by drifts. Solar panels glinted behind a ridge. A stovepipe breathed slow, steady smoke.

Bruce eased the truck to a stop, then leaned back with a sigh. “Damn it. I forgot to shut the secondary flue. That’s why the inverter’s been draining.”

Tony’s brows rose. “You really went full hermit, huh?”

Bruce cut the engine. “It’s warmer than it looks.”

Natasha was already unbuckling.

Wendy lingered in her seat for a moment longer. No fences. No trees. No lines of defense. Just the open distance for miles. She didn’t like it.

It was very exposed.

But Alder leapt down from the truck with practiced ease, tail up, breath puffing. A dog with a pattern. A route.

Wendy followed.

The cold hit sharper than she expected, slicing up under her sleeves and stinging her ears. But she kept moving—step by step, boots crunching the thick snow beneath her feet. The door ahead creaked open with Bruce’s key, and a rush of warm air spilled out, thick with heat from the stove and the faint, bitter edge of coffee gone too long on the burner.

Inside, it was cluttered but not messy. Books, mostly, were stacked on tables and half-open on the couch. A journal with margin notes sat on the armrest, pen uncapped.

There were no pictures, no personal touches, just data, diagrams, dials on the wall for power regulation, and a timer set to four minutes on the counter.

Wendy stood just inside the doorway. She didn’t remove her coat.

Bruce glanced back at her once, just briefly, then turned to hang up his own.

Tony crossed the threshold behind her, hands in his pockets. “Alright, I’m not saying I expected the Fortress of Solitude, but I was definitely picturing something with a few more... throw pillows. Maybe a bong.”

Bruce didn’t rise to it. He moved into the kitchenette instead, flicking off the stove's low burner with a knuckle. The French press sat half-drained beside it.

Natasha shook snow off her sleeves and closed the door behind them.

Alder slinked lazily between them to a spot near the couch, easing into a prone position with her head on her paws. It was very graceful for such a large animal.

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward, not quite. But it held weight. Like the cabin itself—compact, well-insulated, and built to keep pressure from escaping.

Bruce cleared his throat. “There’s tea in the drawer. Coffee’s… over there. If you want something stronger, I can’t help you.”

Wendy didn’t move.

Tony nudged her gently with an elbow. “You good, kid?”

She nodded. Then, after a pause, “I just—it’s quiet.”

Bruce didn’t look up. “That’s the point.”

Bruce poured the last of the lukewarm coffee into his chipped mug, then leaned against the counter. “Alright. What’s this really about?”

Tony glanced toward Natasha, who gave the faintest nod.

Tony started slow. “We needed to make sure you were alive, first of all.”

“Alive and safe ,” Natasha added.

Bruce’s brow furrowed, and a shy smirk graced his lips, more like a grimace. “We all know I don’t go down easily.”

Wendy wasn’t sure what the words meant exactly, but she knew they held some kind of force when a flash of something rushed across Tony and Natasha’s faces. They covered it quickly, but it made her wonder.

Tony sighed, then hooked a stool with his foot and sat backwards on it. “How much do you remember about HYDRA from your high school history classes?”

It was obviously not what Bruce expected him to say, given his quiet buffer while he processed the question. 

“HYDRA?” he asked. “You mean the Nazi science militia?”

“The very same.”

Bruce took a sip of his coffee. “I know they were experimenting with gamma radiation far more advanced than the Allied forces at the time, but they weren’t able to get anything concrete off the ground before the Captain put them in the water. Or before the Manhattan Project reached completion.”

Wendy’s eyes narrowed. Technically, yes. That was true. HYDRA had always had a fascination with radiation and nuclear energy. The sheer number of experiments done in Chernobyl did an excellent job of highlighting that obsession, not to mention their preoccupation with the tesseract. 

“Turns out HYDRA’s still active,” Natasha said quietly. “They’ve been quietly operating since the end of the war. Infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. decades ago. And they’re probably gunning for you.”

Bruce blinked. “No. That’s not—that doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s not a conspiracy theory,” Tony stated. “It’s a fact.”

“You don’t keep something like that buried for seventy years. Not with surveillance, not with global oversight—”

“You do when the oversight itself is corrupted.”

“We’ve proven it,” Natasha interrupted. Bruce’s attention diverted to her. 

“How?”

As if on cue, both Tony and Natasha turned to her.

Wendy shifted her weight, boots still planted just inside the living room. Her voice came low, even, like she was reciting from somewhere far away.

“They raised me. HYDRA. From birth.”

Bruce froze. His mug paused halfway to his mouth.

“I wasn’t in a foster home. I wasn’t in a normal school. I was trained. Conditioned. For… obedience, for infiltration, for elimination.” She said the last word with careful neutrality, as if quoting a manual.

The heat in the cabin seemed to drain. Even Alder, lying by the door, stirred and looked up.

Bruce’s eyes narrowed. “And you brought her here?”

“Hey,” Tony said sharply, the stool scraping a little as he stood. “Wendy’s not the threat in this equation.”

“You just told me HYDRA wants me,” Bruce snapped. “And then you bring someone they trained—”

“She left them,” Natasha cut in, voice like a wire pulled taut. “She broke free, risked her life to find us. You can trust her.”

“We’re protecting her,” Tony added, jaw clenched. “Because she’s not just someone , Bruce.”

Wendy flinched slightly. She knew what was coming.

Tony turned toward her, not looking away as he said, “She’s my daughter.”

The words hung there like the tail end of an explosion. 

She still wasn’t used to it.

In all fairness, it had only been three days.

Bruce’s mouth opened. Then closed again.

“I didn’t realise I’d been gone that long.”

No one laughed.

“Yeah, well, life moves fast when you’re not paying attention. Turns out, I had a kid out there I didn’t know about. And HYDRA got to her first.”

“You’re serious,” he said after a beat, tone skirting on the edge of disbelief.

Tony didn’t move. “As a heart attack.”

Wendy didn’t move either. She didn’t have to.

Bruce looked at her again—really looked. Wendy knew he was looking for the same things she kept searching for in the mirror.

The resemblance wasn’t immediate, but it was there. In the structure of her eyes. In the set of her mouth. In the way she stood her ground.

And something else. Something hushed. The kind of thing that couldn’t be taught. Only inherited.

He stepped back a pace, exhaling like the air had thickened.

Natasha nodded once. “We didn’t come to drop a bombshell. We came to warn you. And we’re not leaving you behind if HYDRA’s tracking gamma signatures.”

Bruce’s hands curled slightly around the mug. “You really think they’re after me?”

“We know they’re interested,” Natasha said. “And if they’ve made contact with anyone nearby—even indirectly—we’re out of time.”

Bruce’s jaw tightened. “I’m not leaving. This place—this distance —it’s the only reason I’ve stayed in control.”

“We’re not here to drag you out kicking and screaming,” Tony reasoned. “But we are here because you won’t have time to run if they come knocking.”

Bruce turned away slightly. “They won’t come here.”

“If we found you, they can too,” Natasha stated.

Wendy stepped forward again. “They already know how to find people like you. They’ve done it before.”

Bruce stared at her with heavy eyes. “What do you mean?”

Wendy stepped further into the room, the soft crunch of snow melting on her boots barely audible over the crackle of the stove. “You moved around a lot, right?”

Bruce’s jaw twitched. “Had to.”

“So, when you were on the run, did you ever come back to a place—one of your workspaces—and find something missing? Files, equipment? Maybe an open drawer that didn’t look rifled through, but you knew you had locked it?”

Bruce crossed his arms, defensive now. “I didn’t exactly leave things catalogued. You live off-grid, stuff happens.”

“I’m not asking if you misplaced things,” Wendy said gently. “I’m asking if you ever felt sure something was taken.”

There was a long pause.

Bruce looked down at his mug. Then beyond it. Past it.

“I… I misplace things a lot,” he said finally. His voice sounded thin, like he was hearing it for the first time. “I thought it was me. I thought I was slipping.”

Wendy’s expression darkened, but she nodded. “You weren’t.”

Bruce looked up again, searching her face. “You’re saying HYDRA—”

“They’ve tried to steal your research before, I know for a fact,” she confirmed. “They’re obsessed with radiation. With what it can do.”

Bruce’s mouth parted, then closed. His grip on the mug had gone white-knuckled. His other hand traced the edge of a composition notebook, pages worn with use.

“Were there…” she hesitated, carefully selecting the right word, “any fatalities? Before you left?”

Bruce flinched. “It wasn’t me,” he said quickly, stepping backward like she might not believe him. “I—I left the minute the local police started swarming. I didn’t touch anyone.”

“I know,” Wendy said, her voice firm. “It wasn’t you. And it wasn’t the… other guy.”

That gave him pause. “Then who?”

She glanced at Natasha. Natasha gave a tight nod.

Wendy’s tone dropped. “They call him the Winter Soldier.”

Bruce looked between them, his brows pulling in hard. “I’ve never heard that name.”

“You weren’t supposed to,” Natasha said quietly. “He was a myth. Whispered in certain circles. A ghost story with a body count.”

Tony chimed in, face hardening. The pallor of his skin had dulled. “HYDRA’s pet assassin. They send him to wipe someone out or steal something they want. A lethal killing machine.”

Bruce let that sink in, shoulders heavy. “And you think he came after me?”

“We don’t know what research they actually have,” Wendy admitted. “But the fact that they went after it confirms one thing.”

Bruce’s voice was barely above a whisper. “They know how to find me.”

She nodded. “They always did.”

And then—

It happened so fast.

The knock at the door was rushed. Loud. Urgent.

Her instinct screamed louder.

Wendy moved like a live wire, grabbing the metal poker from beside the fireplace without hesitation. In one seamless motion, she raised it into position—angled to the outside, elbow high, the weapon drawn up like a blade. Ochs.

Her stance was perfect .

Point leveled at the door.

Eyes locked on target. Breathing even. Heart racing.

Tony startled at the movement, instinctively raising a hand.

Natasha reacted nearly as fast, drawing her own gun from somewhere and aiming it at her. 

The room crackled. 

Natasha’s eyes widened just barely, and she shifted her aim from Wendy to the door. 

Bruce remained still. He’d frozen in place, staring at the door.

A weight touched her knee, and she realized the large wolf-dog had risen from her resting place and was standing stiffly against her, hackles raised. In the silence, a low rumble echoed from her snarled snout.

The knock came again, this time softer. Then a voice: “Banner? It’s Steve. We’re clear.”

Clint’s voice followed. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Tony let out a breath and crossed to the door with a grimace. “Would’ve been nice to get a heads-up.”

Wendy didn’t lower the poker.

Not yet.

The door opened with a quiet creak. Cold air swept in, curling around their ankles and wrists. Steve stepped inside first, followed by Clint. Both halted the moment they saw her.

Wendy held her ground—elbow high, tip forward, breath even. The poker might as well have been forged steel.

Alder growled low and steady, stepping between her and the door like it was instinct.

Steve held himself motionless.

Clint didn’t blink.

Natasha’s aim shifted with the door—first Clint, then Steve, then paused at Wendy. Not quite raised. Not quite lowered.

Tony hovered by the edge of it all, one hand half-lifted, like he couldn’t decide whether to intervene or back away. His eyes darted between Natasha’s gun and Wendy.

Wendy’s hands trembled. Slightly. A sign of tension—not weakness, just something coiled too tight for too long. It was a familiar feeling.

The poker dipped another inch.

Her shoulders followed.

Natasha didn’t lower her weapon until Wendy finally blinked. A tremor passed through her frame. It was a release, like something in her mind let go of the trigger.

She lowered the poker slowly, arm shaking with restraint instead of adrenaline.

Alder relaxed the moment the point dropped. The wolf-dog snorted, padded forward with exaggerated nonchalance, and looped a lazy circle around Steve and Clint. Her body brushed against their legs like a warning cloaked in comfort before returning to Wendy’s side.

She dropped the poker to her side but kept her grip firm around the metal.

Her voice, when it came, was quiet. Flat. Practiced.

“Sorry.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. “You aiming that at us or someone worse?”

She met his gaze. “I didn’t know who was at the door.”

Steve stepped forward then, gentle but grounded. “You did what you were trained to do.”

Wendy shook her head slightly. “It wasn’t training.”

There was ringing in her ears.

Steve focused on Bruce, his voice quieter now. “Can we come in?”

Bruce nodded slowly and stepped back.

The door shut behind them, but the chill remained.

Natasha’s gun disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced. She met Wendy’s eyes once more. 

Clint gave Alder a pat on the shoulder and took off his gloves. “Well. That’s one way to say hello.”

No one laughed.

Bruce crossed to the woodstove, mug still in hand, and stirred the embers with another metal prod. The cabin smelled like cedar and iron and burnt coffee.

Steve didn’t move from where he stood. “We didn’t come here to start a fight. But if we’re going to get anywhere, we need your trust.”

Bruce didn’t look at him. “You don’t get to ask for that. Not when you show up unannounced with a weapon.”

Tony snorted softly. “You think that’s what she is?”

“She’s volatile,” Bruce snapped. “I felt it the second she walked in. You’re asking me to stay calm while you plant a live grenade in my home.”

“She didn’t blow,” Clint muttered.

Bruce’s voice darkened. “This time.”

Wendy didn’t flinch, but it was a near thing. 

Natasha folded her arms. “She was controlled. Focused. That's not volatility, it's discipline. You know a thing or two about that.”

“Discipline doesn’t stop a bomb from going off,” Bruce said.

“Are you saying you’re the bomb,” Clint asked, “or she is?” 

The doctor glanced her way, returning his poker to the cradle pointedly. She followed his lead. 

“I’ve been doing well, thanks for asking,” he said, voice weak even in Wendy’s ears. “ Avoiding stress is the key. Peace. Everything about this world,” —he gestured vaguely at the group of them— “everything about this life , it’s the opposite of peaceful. I can’t count on meditation to be able to manage it.”

Wendy kept her gaze fixed on him.

He kept talking like peace was the same thing as safety; if he hid far enough quietly, the world would leave him alone.

But that was the myth, wasn’t it? The myth of peace.

Steve stepped in again, quiet but deliberate. “What’s more of a risk, Doctor,” he asked, “that you lose control in the sanctity of a tower that can hold the Hulk? Or HYDRA replicating your research to make more of you?”

Bruce’s mouth tensed. “You think I haven’t asked myself that? Every day? I gave up everything to keep my research out of the government’s hands, let alone some Nazi sleeper organization.”

Tony leaned against the kitchen island, fingers tapping once against the marble before falling still.

“I’m not safe to be around,” Bruce said. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest, like the flannel and thermal weren’t enough to keep out the cold. “I can’t stay in New York. Not around so many people.”

Natasha’s voice cut in, low and sharp. “What about the people you’re treating now? With that line of thinking, are they not at risk? What about the kids in the village? Are they scared of you?”

“They don’t know they should be,” Bruce seethed. His eyes flared—not fully, but enough. A pulse of green bled into his glare before fading.

Alder let out a faint whuff from where she’d curled near the hearth. Wendy held her breath.

“You think this is noble?” Bruce went on. “Dragging a child into this? Into me ?” His glare pivoted to Tony. “What kind of father brings his kid into a situation like this?”

Tony didn’t rise to it. He stood still for a beat, then tilted his head.

“You think we’d bring her out here for no reason? Think we’d risk that?”

“I think you’re scared,” Bruce said. “And you should be. But panic makes people misread patterns.”

“No.” 

Wendy’s voice cut through before anyone else could answer. Calm. Direct.

“No. Panic makes you freeze. Makes you follow old patterns even when they don’t work anymore, because it’s what you know. And there’s comfort in that.”

Bruce’s breath caught slightly. He stayed silent, his stare fixed on the ground.

She stepped forward. “You’re not panicking. You’re hiding. But HYDRA doesn’t care where you hide. They don’t care what corner of the earth you seclude yourself in. The tools at their disposal will find you. And you’ll wish you’d listened to us.”

Bruce set the mug down hard enough for it to clink. “This isn’t your fight.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t get a vote.”

Bruce stared at her, just for a second.

Then he looked away.

Alder shifted again, nails clicking softly against the wood floor.

Steve was the one to break the silence. “Wendy’s right. You didn’t choose this, Bruce. Neither did she. But that doesn’t make it not your fight.”

Bruce ran a hand through his hair, pacing a few steps toward the counter before stopping short of leaning on it. “You want me to come back. To suit up. To... to be part of a team again.”

“You were never off it,” Steve said.

Tony pushed off the island, slower now. “This isn’t recruitment. It’s survival. Ours, yours, and everyone we can still protect.”

Bruce turned toward the window, the cold light of early afternoon still low and silver through the fogged glass. “I can’t control what happens if it goes wrong.”

“You’re assuming it will,” Natasha said quietly.

He didn’t answer.

“I used to assume the same thing,” she added. “Still do, sometimes.”

That drew his eyes—just briefly. But Natasha held steady.

“This is different,” Bruce said eventually.

“No, it’s not,” Natasha replied. “You keep telling yourself you’re a danger to others, but the truth is, you’re just scared you’ll be seen. Fully. And if someone sees you, they can decide you're worth fearing.”

“Tell me I’m not.”

“No,” she said. “I’m telling you you're not alone.”

Bruce blinked. Then scoffed under his breath and shook his head, more bitter than amused. “You all came prepared for a fight.”

“We came prepared for anything,” Clint said. “Hoping for the best.”

Wendy stepped forward again, just enough to be in his line of sight. “I’ve seen them. Up close. Right now, they’re still operating in the shadows. They’re whispering into the ears of powerful men, or have even worked to become those men. They’re in the governments, not just America’s. It’s a systemic infection.”

Bruce studied her for a moment. And this time, he didn’t look away.

“You said HYDRA won’t stop.”

“They won’t,” she said. “And they already have part of your work. We’re not asking you to be the Hulk. We’re asking you to help stop them before they use it on someone else.” Her breath faltered, then she drove it home. “Before they use it on someone like me.”

The old floor creaked beneath his step. He turned away from the window and moved toward the table slowly. The silence settled again—but lighter this time, like it might shift.

He reached for the mug.

“Can I finish my coffee before I make any life-altering decisions?” he asked, dry.

Tony raised a brow. “Only if you share the pot.”

Bruce sighed. Then, finally, the edge of his mouth twitched. “Cabinet above the sink.”

Tony gave a two-fingered salute and moved toward the cabinet. “Copy that, Doctor Robert.”

Wendy didn’t follow Tony’s movement. She watched Bruce instead—the set of his shoulders, the tight hold he still kept on his breath. For a long time, she’d believed what he did. That stillness could be peace. That distance could be safety. That if you disappeared quietly enough, the pain would forget you. But it was never true. Not for her. Not for any of them.

The world didn’t hand over peace.

It had to be taken. Earned. Fought for.

And it never came without risk.

Chapter Text

The problem was the dog, in the end.

Alder had made it clear in the weeks she’d been around that no one owned her. She chose when to come inside, when to follow him around. If she was bored with his mind-numbing research and mutterings to himself, she’d slink to the door and use her tail to tell him she wanted out. 

He never once forced her to stay when she didn’t want to.

It was highly likely that Bruce saw himself in her, the way she needed the freedom to leave whenever she desired. If he psychoanalyzed himself—a dangerous pastime—he might’ve admitted that her presence had started to feel like a mirror. Not a comforting one, though. She was independent, instinctive, and never fully at ease. She kept her distance unless she wanted something. She trusted on her terms, if at all.

Which meant staying with him wasn’t fair. Not to her.

He told himself she’d be better off here, where people passed through. Where she could come and go. She’d have miles and miles of open tundra to run through, and Linda had a big enough heart that she’d never leave Alder without a meal.

The only option he had was to leave her behind.

 That was how he found himself parking the Jeep back at the clinic. Tony, Natasha, and the kid stayed inside the truck while he stepped out. Steve and Clint had already headed off to the rendezvous point. He opened the back door and found Alder sitting on the floor, her head in Wendy’s lap.

“Time to go,” he said quietly, gesturing to the ground. Usually, Alder hopped out before he even had to say anything, but she just stared at him, amber eyes peeking at him from her place on the kid’s lap.

He didn’t repeat himself. He just waited, watching.

Wendy didn’t look at him either. She kept her hand on Alder’s scruff, thumb moving in slow, even circles the way you’d calm a heartbeat.

“She doesn’t want to,” she said after a moment. Not defiant—just matter-of-fact. Like weather. Like facts on a chart.

“I know,” Bruce said. “Neither do I.”

He crouched, joints protesting, and let his hand fall palm-up by the edge of the seat. Alder didn’t move at first. Then, after a long pause, she shifted her weight forward and nosed his fingers. Her nose was a little dry.

He didn’t deserve it.

“She’s not a pet,” he said, more to himself than to Wendy. “She’s not built for cages or skyscrapers.”

“She doesn’t need to be wild,” Wendy said quietly. “She needs to know she’s safe. That someone’s not going to make her choose between survival and loyalty.”

Bruce glanced up. Wendy was still watching Alder, but her jaw was tight now, her voice edged with something that had nothing to do with dogs.

Alder finally shifted, just enough to rest her chin against Wendy’s thigh.

Wendy blinked, but didn’t cry. “So don’t tell me it’s kinder to leave her behind.”

Bruce looked at Tony. The man was sitting behind the passenger seat, watching his daughter with pursed lips. He’d only really known Tony for a couple of days, and in those days, half of them were spent trying to stave off the inevitable battle. He only saw the man’s mask fall once—in that lab on the helicarrier. 

But the expression on his face first made Bruce’s heart hurt, like acid reflux, then it made him uneasy. He really, really wasn’t good at handling other people’s emotions.