Work Text:
“Not the most assembled team, huh?” Billy says. Billy’s been working on repurposing his Thor cosplay but for now, he’s in gym shorts and a hoodie. Teddy’s got slightly better work-out clothes but only Patriot and Iron Lad are actually suited up for the team’s test runs.
Teddy joins him on the bench where they left their backpacks and they watch Nathaniel dig through the computer’s guts while Eli snips at him with his arms folded. Somehow, Eli’s help isn’t making things go faster.
The third practice session for the Avengers Failsafe Program doesn’t go much better than the first two sessions. They haven’t made it through a session without an incident yet, and this week it was Billy’s turn. He should be more excited about being in the actual Avengers Mansion, and the knock-off Danger Room that Iron Lad has rigged together in the basement, but probably the actual Thor never short-circuited the computer two minutes in.
“Nope. But we’re not doing so bad,” says Teddy. He shrugs and doesn’t look concerned by the amount of unheroic arguing going on across the room from them. “I’ve never been a superhero before, but I have a single mom so I’ve done a lot of after-school sports. It takes time for everyone to click. You should have seen my second-grade peewee basketball team. This is nothing.”
“It’s probably the name,” says Billy. “Avengers Failsafe Program just doesn’t go great with an ‘Assemble!’ or a ‘To me!’” Then his eyes catch on Teddy’s hand. “Oh, jeez, Ted! Doesn’t that hurt?” He reaches out to touch and immediately pulls back when a lingering spark shoots from his fingertip.
“Huh?” Teddy looks confused until he follows Billy’s eyeline down to his hand where one of Eli’s throwing stars is stuck wedged into his skin between two knuckles like a painful and shitty discount Wolverine or a shop class accident. “Oh, no, it’s fine.” He gives Billy an easy, disarming smile as he makes a fist and, even though it looked like it had sunk in about an inch deep, the throwing star obediently pops out of his skin and clatters to the floor at their feet. “It doesn’t hurt. I didn’t put any nerves there.”
“You can just do that?”
Teddy turning into a green and giant and sexy mini Hulk is already impressive enough and Billy has noticed his arms stretching just a little more than they should when he reaches for the top shelf of his locker, but the idea that he’s in such complete control of his powers and his own body that he can move his entire nervous system around at will is just… Wow.
“I do it during football season a lot,” Teddy says. “It makes being full-body tackled a lot more fun.” The green skin on the back of his hand seals itself shut like nothing had happened and then it shifts back to pink as Teddy drops from Hulkling and back into Teddy.
“That’s amazing. That you can be so precise with your powers,” says Billy. “I can’t even roll my tongue.”
“I think that’s just genetic.”
“My brothers can both do it. It’s very annoying.”
“That they do it or that you can’t?”
“See, questions like that are how I knew you’re an only child.”
“Well, there goes my secret identity.” Teddy scoots closer and touches Billy’s hand. No sparks this time. Well. Plenty of sparks, just all of the metaphorical variety. “Your powers are pretty impressive too, Thor.”
“Pfft,” says Billy. The lightning is cool in theory but Nathaniel and Eli are still arguing loudly thanks to how impressive Billy’s powers are and, the other night, his dad left the pot roast in the oven a little too long and the whole apartment made him queasy with a scent like Kesler’s burning skin. And then his mom had to explain a recent study on sense memory for fifteen minutes before she agreed to let him eat cereal in his room. “I had to go for the hammer god. No one remembers Living Lightning.” He takes Teddy’s hand fully into his and runs his thumb over pristine skin. There isn’t a single sign of the injury that had been there ninety seconds ago. “You just have so much control. I can’t do that,” he marvels. “They can’t do that.”
Eli is clumsy with his strength, picking up things with too much force, pulling doors off hinges. Nathaniel can fly really well, and he’s got the prodigy tech genius gimmick down, but his targeting is shaky and he isn’t natural yet in the suit, startling and freezing and thinking through his next move when it always seems so natural for Iron Man.
“I do,” Teddy agrees. “But that’s not a fair comparison. I had a head start on all of you. I’ve always been able to do this.” His hand in Billy’s expands and turns green again, then thickens into a carapace and he grows claws, then it shrinks down and turns red with black webs to resemble Spider-Man’s costume.
“I’ve edited a lot of X-Men pages on Heropedia,” says Billy, which is usually the worst burn he could give himself but not with these guys and especially not with Teddy. “Not a lot of mutations manifest before puberty. You’re kind of extraordinary.”
Teddy shrugs. Not bashful, just not agreeing either. “I’m just me. It’s just part of who I am. You’ll get the hang of yours too. As someone who spends most weekdays at practice, I can promise from experience that anything gets easier if you do it often enough.”
“At least the lightning I can do on purpose,” Billy says. “The other stuff is like… not a reflex but it feels kind of like I’m trying to control my own heartbeat. It’s a part of me and I can feel it but I don’t know how to make it do what I want. Sometimes I wish my soda was colder and then poof! it’s full of ice. Or I think about getting up to turn on the light in my room and it turns itself on. I don’t know how I can practice that.”
“Hm.” Teddy thinks about this and squeezes Billy’s hand while he does, his thumb running a circle against Billy’s palm. It’s like the lightning reverses and courses back through his veins. “My mom had a lot of those self-help books. The ones from Barnes & Noble that always have a white lady on the cover and tell you how to manifest the future you want for yourself. Your powers kind of remind me of that. Believing in something enough will make it happen. Wanting something so much that you make it happen.”
“Is your mom secretly Kree?” Billy asks.
“Secretly a Kree soldier who ran away to Earth to sell real estate and bake pie. We’ve found her out.”
“She does make really good pie.”
“Maybe she manifested that.” Teddy smiles. “Maybe it won’t help, but you could come over some time and read through them. Give it a try.”
Of course Billy is tempted by any conceivable excuse to spend some time with Teddy. And going over to Teddy’s place means they’ll get to be relatively alone too. But as much as their mutual superhero geeking has brought them together, there’s a string of frustrated elementary and middle school parent-teacher conferences from Billy’s past to give him a good idea of how exactly accepting Teddy’s offer might end.
“I don’t think so. Sorry,” Billy says. And then when Teddy looks a little sad, he explains, “I have to read pretty much everything out loud to understand it. It’s like my brain can’t really process it if I don’t hear it out loud in my own voice. I’d be annoying.”
“Oh,” says Teddy, not put off at all. “I wouldn’t be annoyed by that. I like hearing your voice.” He smiles the most genuine and honest and cutest smile humanly possible.
Billy smiles back, briefly wordless.
“Have you tried saying out loud the things you want to happen when you use your powers?” Teddy asks.
“No. The Scarlet Witch always just—” Billy wiggles his fingers through the air demonstratively. “And Doctor Strange has incantations he yells out. I don’t know those.”
“Yeah, but you’re not the Scarlet Witch or Doctor Strange,” says Teddy. “If you need to hear it to focus, maybe saying out loud what you want to happen will help you… magic it into happening?”
“I guess it’s worth a try,” Billy says, already a little embarrassed. He glances over to see if he’s about to draw attention, but Eli and Nathaniel are still arguing and he can at least keep his voice lower than that. Besides, it’s Teddy’s idea and that means it can’t be all bad. Billy feels bolder beside him, and excited. And soothed. And full of butterflies. And like nothing he does is ever actually embarrassing.
He looks around, for something he wants to magic into obedience and his eye lands on the throwing star lying discarded on the floor beside his sneaker, one point still damp with Teddy’s blood.
“Float,” Billy tells it.
The throwing star stays still.
“Float,” he tries again, to the same result. “Hover. Fly away. Wingardium leviosa.” He makes a few Scarlet Witchy gestures at it but it still doesn’t budge.
“Maybe try really describing it,” suggests Teddy. “Don’t tell it what to do, tell me what you want to happen.”
“I want the throwing star to lift up off the floor,” says Billy. Hearing the words lets the image echo more forcefully in his head, take on a more solid shape, and the more real the image becomes, the easier it is to put it back into words. “I want the throwing star to hover.” Hover is a good one, like Iron Man or their newly-dubbed Iron Lad, and it makes him specifically picture the star keep its surfaces parallel to the floor and drifting up straight and smoothly with no wobble, the clearest image he’s had of his goal, and when he says, “I want the throwing star to hover,” again, that’s exactly what it does.
He keeps telling it to hover, repeating the words until they run together and the sentence no longer begins or ends but just continues on in an endless loop of want. “—STARTOHOVERIWANTTHETHROWINGSTARTOHOVERIWANT—“ Billy shapes the words in his mouth, breathes life into them, and watches them manifest in action as surely as the thoughts manifest as sound waves.
It’s a small, hovering piece of metal. And it’s hovering because Billy wanted it strongly enough.
Teddy gasps in delight and his hand claps tight over Billy’s upper arm. “You did it! That’s amazing!”
Teddy’s hand on his arm is warm and strong and that’s amazing too. It feels like little cartoon heart doodles radiate out from the contact like a lovesick comic strip character. Billy feels proud of himself, for once in his life, and powerful and excited and exciting. The power is exhilarating but it’s nothing compared to being amazing to Teddy Altman.
He grins and lets the throwing star clink to the ground. “If you think that’s cool, you should check out my next trick.” He puts his own hand out, touches Teddy’s cheek. “I want you to kiss me. I want you to—”
Somewhere distant and unimportant for the next several minutes, Eli says, “Has anyone seen my other—?” But Billy is on a roll with this whole manifesting thing and is way too preoccupied to hear the rest.