I, Carrion (Icarian)
James couldn’t name a day that didn’t involve some type of reality crisis since he started his residency at Queen’s memorial hospital, but it did at least, keep his life interesting.
Today it had been Lily’s son Harry, an enigmatic young kid that somehow exceeded all expectations of a five year old and also confused every single medical professional out there.
Lily had brought him to work with her like she does some days when she can’t find a sitter, setting the boy up in an empty hospital room with enough books and art supplies to keep an entire kingdom of five-year-olds happy let alone one.
Of course, Harry is not the average five year old, and very quickly got bored, wandering around the hospital with a puzzled look on his face while he followed the nurses.
James loves the little shit, their lovingly dubbed frat baby that Lily’s entire friend group has been raising for four years, but it would never not be weird to see the little toddler actually have some sort of autonomy, far too used to just scooping up the baby and carrying him around on his hip.
It’s pure chance that Lily enrolled at residency the same place that James did, two months out from becoming a fully fledged nurse while Lily is still in the training and paperwork stage.
She got held back two entire semesters because of her pregnancy, and yet she still managed to catch up enough to graduate a semester earlier than anyone expected.
She’s the strongest person James knows.
Somehow, Harry got caught up talking to an elderly patient, and James caught him sneaking jello upstairs, so he threw the kid over his shoulder.
Harry pouted about it but otherwise hadn’t objected to being uprooted and paraded around like a sack of potatoes as James stopped by different places to check on things on the way back to Harry’s room.
While Harry begins to protest at being left in the room again, Lily rushes in, sweeping locks of stray curly hair back from her face as she dashes toward Harry, grabbing his face in her hands as she pulls the boy towards her, “There you are baby, where’d you go?”
The kid doesn’t respond, instead stepping closer to his mother as she picks him up, hugging him tight to her.
Noticing Lily’s white knuckles, shaking hands, and red eyes, James quirks a concerned brow at her and she sends him a very obvious look, “Later.”
Nodding, James makes his way out of the room, watching through the window as Lily hugs him for a few more moments before setting him up with his favorite movie of the week (this week is Rise of the Guardians) and joining James outside.
James raises a questioning brow as he leans against the wall, watching Lily heavy out a sigh as she runs a shaking hand through her hair.
“Sev called.”
The words punch James through his stomach like a knife, skewering his insides and flooding panic into his veins as he stands up straighter, suddenly ready to fight as he shakes out his hands, “What’d he want? Is there anything I can do to-”
“It’s his night but he can’t take Harry.”
Severus Snape, the stereotypical deadbeat dad that knocked up his girlfriend in college and refused to sign the birth certificate until two days after the birth. He goes through periods where he wants to be in Harry’s life just to get back with Lily (who wants nothing to do with him) and periods where he refuses he has a son that exists because of the type of people he hangs out with.
He’s a sleazy businessman and nothing more who pressured a girl to be his girlfriend and then threatened his girlfriend into having unprotected sex and refuses to see the ugly side of raising a kid.
“What’s that? The third time he’s canceled this month?”
Lily sighs, leaning against the wall as if for stability, “Something came up with his work. It’s fine, easier for me even, but you know how he gets.”
James does know how he gets, he probably demanded to get Harry a different day where it would be most convenient for him but inconvenient for Lily and then threatened to take her back to court because he could definitely afford a better lawyer than Lily could dream of having.
He likes the idea of having an accessory to teach business terms to, he refuses to acknowledge this accessory is a child that deserves a good father.
“What’d Harry say?”
The self-deprecating chuckle that Lily releases makes James’s heart sink into his stomach, “I didn’t even tell him it’s Sev’s night. I’ve learned that the more last minute is the better because Sev can never be trusted to follow through.”
“I’ll take him tonight if you want? You can have a girls night and Sirius and I’ll take care of him.” He can’t remember if Sirius is patrolling or not tonight, but James doesn’t mind having Harry either way, “It’ll be just like old times.”
Lily grimaces, “I don’t get off until five in the morning tomorrow, I picked up a double from Mary in Maternity. I had kind of been banking on Sev picking him up.”
Beaming, James claps, “I get off in two hours. That’s enough time for Harry to finish the movie and get restless again. He can sleep over at my house and you can come over for lunch after a quick power nap tomorrow morning.”
Weight visibly lifts off Lily’s shoulders as she lifts her gaze from the ground to look at James properly, “That’d be so nice.”
“It’s settled then, easy. It’s not like I have anything to do tonight anyway and I’ve missed my little man.”
Chuckling wetly, Lily steps forward into James’s open arms as the opening sequence of Rise of the Guardians filters out the cracked door.
In another universe, James kisses her not on the forehead but on the lips, resting his head on his girlfriend’s head as their son plays in the room next to them while they work on their careers. In another life James helps Lily raise a boy that is his in every way but biology. In another time they make it work and they stay together in Junior year and James proposes when they graduate college.
In that time, Lily and Severus don’t still have to have some sort of relationship for the sake of their son, Lily doesn’t have to struggle with raising a boy basically by herself watching all of the friends her age enter into their successful young adult lives while she still tries to claw out of debt from her entire college experience.
Releasing a shaky breath, Lily steps away, giving a loose smile, “I have to go grab the needles for level three, thank you James.”
Running a hand through his hair, James beams at her as she walks off, letting out a heavy breath as he leans against the wall and tilts his head, listening to the dialogue floating through the door
“It is our job to watch over the children of the world, and keep them safe - to bring wonder, hope and dreams. And so, I've called us all here for one reason, and one reason only - the children are in danger.”
The child in question watching that movie is so loved, just not by the stereotypical mom and dad.
James managed to find frozen dinosaur chicken nuggets in his freezer, they expire in a month but they smell fine so he plops the rest of the bag on a pan and puts it in the oven.
Somehow, Harry has figured out how to turn on James’s speaker and is rolling it around on the floor while James cooks, watching his phone to make sure none of the music queued would emotionally scar a five year old too badly.
Sirius still hasn’t texted him back, but that’s more common these days with all the odd schedules and random on shift calls he gets, the man is less and less chronically online, which is good for his mental health but it is killing James.
The compromise he’s found is obsessively consuming breaking news stories that cops arrive at to make sure there are no blue coated deaths. With both Sirius and Peter in the force and split between precincts, he’s started caring a lot more about the fucked up judicial system.
When Sirius had told him he wanted to go into law enforcement, James had fallen out of his chair laughing.
This had been the same man who had illegally gotten two underage tattoos and had been picked up for countless parties underage by the police and often ended up spending the night there because his own parents couldn’t be half-assed enough to pick him up.
At the time, the only cop he knew had been Andromeda, which had been ironic seeing as she’d been disowned from her entire family for deciding to transition into a female and she avidly hated the system. She had taken Sirius and James to an ACAB rally when they were fifteen, two years after joining the police force, and had peacefully protested against her own job.
James couldn’t understand why Sirius would want to be part of that.
Even still, James has been looking into emergency response positions instead of pursuing another year of residency for recommendation of a higher education, looking into the qualifications it would take to get him on the scene with Sirius, trying to find where he could help the most.
James, Lily, and Mary went into medicine and Sirius and Peter went into law enforcement, he’s pretty sure Marlene has been working on her presidential campaign for ten years from now and Dorcas got into law school.
They’ll take the world by storm one day, one step at a time.
It’s odd, that they’re expected now to find their place in the world, a daunting task compared to the worries of their adolescence, but James has always had to be mature for his age, this really isn’t anything new.
After feeding and bathing Harry, James has a thirty minute dance party until the energetic toddler is falling asleep on his feet, going to bed with minimal protest as James settles down on the couch, the radio next to him droning on about different crimes that had been committed and the different officers called to them as he works on a paper for his next medical study.
Halfway through the grueling description of how to use bone marrow in crime scenes, the man on the radio pipes up with a story of a grocery store on fire following a bank robbery that went wrong.
It’s in Sirius’s precinct.
Shooting off a worried text, James sets his phone down screen up and glances out the window, too far away to see anything but smoke from his apartment, but he’s been to that grocery store before, he knows the type of people that go there.
It’s wrong to expect Sirius to text back immediately, so he doesn’t, but over an hour later he’s begun pacing, biting his nails obsessively as he glances over at his dark phone every thirty seconds, trying to come up with reasons why his best friend could possibly not be responding.
The radio hadn’t talked anymore about the crime, but they would’ve said if any officers got hurt, so it’s probably safe to assume none did.
But the NYPD is so stingy with their information, how can he be sure Sirius isn’t dying in an ambulance somewhere and the NYPD hasn’t released a statement about it yet.
He’s startled out of his frankly worrying train of thoughts by a sharp rap on his window, a small one-two-three pattern that makes him jump as he spins towards the sound.
He lets out a sigh of relief at the sight of Spider-man, opening the window for the vigilante as he stares warily up at the bottom of the fire escape above him that Spider-man is standing upside-down on.
Spider-man makes no attempt to come in, so James swipes the first aid kit from next to the window and slips out into the night, the sound of sirens and shouting louder without his window to badly muffle it.
Neither of them talk as Spider-man flips to stand next to him and they both naturally take seats, James running a critical eye over the man as he tries to identify an injury.
Without being asked, Spider-man silently holds up his arm, the nasty burn on the upper part of it gleaming in the slivers of light that slip through the bars of his fire escape, painting the entire scene silvery.
James curses quietly as he places a gentle hand on the man’s wrist, twisting his arm slightly to get a better view of the whole thing.
Glancing up slightly, he inspects the slightly tense stance of the silent infamously loud mouthed hero as he weighs his options, startling when Spider-man’s head whips toward him, “Yes?”
James glances warily back inside his apartment, staring at his kitchen sink, “We need to run it over lukewarm water, it’ll help with inflammation.”
Spider-man pulls back slightly, but not enough to slide his arm out of James’s loose grip, obviously wary of entering James’s apartment.
“I’ll keep the window open the whole time and if it makes you more comfortable we can come back out here while I finish cleaning and wrapping it,” James cuts himself off before he rambles more, fidgeting in the awkward silence as Spider-man tilts his head to the side while he thinks.
“Okay,” Spider-man says softly, suddenly sounding far more human than James could ever imagine, far younger too, like a child forced to grow up too soon, pushed into adulthood when he’d already been an adult for years.
James could relate.
Spider-man sits silently atop the kitchen counter as James irrigates the burn to the best of his ability, trying to be gentle and keep the ruined fabric out of the way, noting silently the small electrical burns like wiring shorted out on the guy’s skin.
He breaks the silence after a moment, “Could…is there any way you could remove this sleeve to get rid of the fabric, it’s getting caught in the burn.”
Spider-man’s shoulder’s jump slightly at the noise, but he doesn’t make any other inclination that he’s heard him for a good few heartbeats as James practically holds his breath in nervous anticipation.
The hero presses the spider in the center of his chest with his good arm and the top half of the suit bags out, allowing Spider-man to slip his arms out of the sleeves as he wraps the long sleeves around his waist and ties them together.
James pointedly does not look because he’s earned Spider-man’s trust thus far and will not lose it by getting so distracted staring at the guy’s chest that he just altogether stops treating the wound Spider-man is here for him to fix.
Their relationship is transactional, an unneeded comfort for James that Spider-man could find anywhere else if he bothered for five minutes to take care of himself.
Some secret guilty part of James has been hoping since the last time that Spider-man gets slightly injured again so the vigilante has a reason to come back.
James tilts his arm until the burn has water running over it but the stream isn’t directly falling onto it, running a careful thumb over the burn as he eyes it warily, trying to remember the classifiers for each degree of a burn and how to treat each of them.
It's silent for at least ten minutes before Spider-man speaks again, still in that soft hesitant tone like he isn’t sure if he should be allowed to talk through the calm silence, “Is…could…” he trails off, obviously frustrated with himself and James wants so badly to help that he aches with it.
“Is the burn…”
Spider-man’s voice is rough, like he’s inhaled a bunch of smoke, like he’s ripped his vocal chords out of his throat and scraped them against rocks.
James smiles at him in what is hopefully reassuring, “It isn’t too bad, just needs some burn cream and wrapping.”
Spider-man nods, and they fade back into slightly awkward silences as Spider-man fidgets every now and then while James turns off the faucet and dabs at the burn until it’s dry, opening up the first aid kit as he searches for the burn cream.
The dim light of the kitchen against the blue light floating in from the window paints a lovely little picture, quiet like a short movie’s strategic silence, like the settling after a shock wave, a tired aching supplied with ringing and white flashes.
It’s not the calm before the storm, it’s the silent shock after you’ve been drowned.
It’s beautiful.
Harry’s padded footsteps down the hall towards them slowly brings James back towards reality as he wraps Spider-man’s arm.
Spider-man obviously hears him, perking up slightly as his shoulders rise once again towards his ears, though he still hasn’t run, he still hasn’t left.
Some small broken part of James is freed, is alive, is lifted at the thought that Spider-man trusts him enough to stay.
James turns to see Harry in the doorway, leaning against the door for support as he sucks on the thumb in his mouth, his other hand holding the blanket that’s wrapped around him like a cape and trailing off to the side in the direction he walked from.
“J’mes?” Harry mumbles, hand rubbing into his eyes as he fights to keep them open past his lingering exhaustion.
Giving the boy no more time to wake up, he sweeps over and lifts him into his arms, tucking him securely into his side, “Hey Monkey, it’s past your bedtime.”
Harry hums slightly, leaning into James and resting his head on his shoulder as James runs a hand through the boy’s unruly hair.
James turns back toward Spider-man, grinning sheepishly as Spider-man stares at the pair, “I’m gonna go get him settled. It’ll only take a moment. Don’t go, I want to check the rest of your arm for any stray sparks I didn’t notice.”
Spider-man doesn’t make any kind of indication that he heard him, but he also doesn’t try to leave so James takes the positives where he can and ushers Harry back into bed.
The boy is unwilling, but too tired to fight it, so it doesn’t take long to get him situated.
James makes to turn off the light once more before Harry speaks up, “Who’s that?”
“Who?”
“The guy in the kitchen.”
Grimacing slightly, James smiles at Harry, “Just a friend, he got a little hurt so he stopped by so I could patch up his boo-boos like mommy does at her job.”
Settling a little further down into the bed cushions, Harry mumbles, “Oh, okay.”
“Night monkey.”
“Nigh’ J’mes.”
When he returns to the kitchen, it is to a closed window and a sticky note that says “Thank you.”
Spider-man is nowhere to be found.
Harry James Potter had been born in a small hospital to a single mom and a dad that had refused for days to sign the birth certificate.
Regulus already had an extensive three page file detailing everything there is to know about the child.
Somehow in the past few hours, his burn has finally healed. He thinks it’s somewhere in between the frantic research of the child’s mother and the stress building of a better version of the laser that the gang the previous night had used.
Either way, his burn is fully healed now and he knows twice as much information about New York’s childcare system than he did before.
Sometime between knocking out the final details on the battery and finishing the prototype, the sun has risen and people have begun arriving at the tower.
The influx of heartbeats and breathing and blood rushing through veins that infiltrates his senses nearly sends him into a sensory overload, but Kreacher breaks through the increasing stimulus flooding his brain as he announces, “Master Black, you heart rate is more elevated than normal, may I suggest some breathing exercises? This increased heart rate could be a symptom of multiple deadly diseases according to WebMD, that include: Heart Attack…”
Regulus latches on to Kreacher’s voice like a tether, grounding himself to the room as his wiggling fingers seek purchase on the concrete ground, trying to focus on the texture and temperature of it.
Once he’s realized the contents of which Kreacher is spewing, he grapples for the edge of the table to pull himself up, “Kreacher stop listing.”
Immediately, Kreacher stops talking, continuing hesitantly after a blessedly silent moment, “Are you o-”
“Enough Kreacher.”
That command seems to be enough to knock out whatever semblance of concern a non-feeling AI could dredge up, “You have four new notifications.”
Massaging the already forming migraine behind his eyes, Regulus leans against the desk and stares at the floor, “Read them to me.”
“Magic word input required.”
“Kreacher,” he warns, turning to one of the screens that displays the little like that shows Kreacher’s audio.
The AI does not concede.
“Fine. Read them to me please.”
Finally appeased, the stupid little AI continues, “Two messages from Bartylus-Maximus: ‘u gud?’ and: ‘can you cum over later or are you too busy being a little bitch’. One message from Evan :): ‘Hey, Barty had a bad night last night, could you swing by the apartment if you get a free chance?’”
“Tell Barty he’s a prick and let Evan know I’ll be over later.”
“You have a meeting at eight, I am penciling in a visit to your friends after that. Otherwise, you are free today.”
Regulus sits back down at his desk, twiddling with some schematics for something or other, “My final notification?”
“It is an unidentified number. The message just reads: prepare yourself. Trace has already started on the phone, but it looks like a burner.”
The migraine behind his eyes begins throbbing slightly as Regulus rubs his forehead, “Just what I needed today.”
Pulling up to Barty and Evan’s penthouse is always slightly surreal, both in the way that neither of them live with their parents and also in the fact that there’s virtually no security and half the world could just stroll in and shoot up the place.
He takes the elevator straight up with no problem, using the temporary card they gave him three years ago that never got deactivated to access the upper level penthouses and enters the scene with an air of a soldier entering an active war zone.
All of their floor to ceiling windows have been covered with blackout curtains, the only light in the room coming from the six or so candles strewn haphazardly around the room as a movie plays from the big screen in front of their couch.
“Are you watching the shining?”
Both Evan and Barty shoot up, spinning around in surprise at Regulus’s sudden appearance. Both boys have a tendency to become transfixed when they absorb themselves in media and honestly, it would be too easy for someone bad to sneak into their apartment and harm them before they even noticed.
Evan beams at the sight of him, jumping over the back of the couch so he can greet him with an arm slung casually around his shoulder, “Barty, our little Reggie’s here.”
Shrugging off the arm, Regulus walks toward their open kitchen to make himself a drink, “We’re the same age and I’m taller than Barty.”
“Fuck off Black, it’s a two inch difference.”
“Figures you wouldn’t understand the difference two extra inches could make, it’s not like it would change how awful of a lover you are.”
Barty throws a pillow at him as Evan cackles, bending over in breathless laughter as Regulus easily catches it and lobs it right back at Barty.
He fishes out the tea bags shoved into the back of their pantry (bought specifically for Regulus) and fills a mug half with water and half with whiskey, putting the tea bag in and popping it into the microwave for a minute.
While he waits for the microwave to warm up his drink, he catches yet another pillow thrown at him, lobbing it back in the general direction of stifled laughter as he gets his tea out of the microwave and takes a sip, wincing at the burning sensation on his tongue.
He settles on the couch between Evan and Barty, shoving off the arm Barty tries to ruffle his hair with, “Don’t fuck with me Crouch.”
Evan practically crows in laughter as candles flicker all over the room, a little girl on the screen screaming shrilly as blood splatters everywhere.
Regulus winces at the gore, having seen far too much of it since he started being Spider-man, “What even is this shit?”
Barty shoves his elbow into Regulus’s ribs to get him to scoot over so he can sprawl out more, “The good shit.”
Evan pushes against the foot laid across Regulus’s and his lap, “Oi, Crouch, stop monopolizing my fucking couch.”
This obviously has to devolve into a shoving match that somehow ends with all three boys laying together in a tangle of limbs, Regulus’s tea still untouched and perfect as he takes another sip.
Ten minutes later and four gory on-screen deaths Regulus can barely take it, “Why are we watching this shit? You both hate gore.”
Nodding sagely like that comment answered the question, Barty says, “We have to desensitize ourselves.”
“To fucking what? What the internal organs of an eight year old look like?”
Evan joins in on the nodding, “Precisely, and you better pay attention too because you’re the most squeamish out of the lot of us.”
Groaning, Regulus settles back down, not nearly done with the conversation, “That’s third grade, everyone’s squeamish in third grade, especially when you’re in third grade as a six year old.”
Barty stretches out, managing to successfully ruffle Regulus’s hair as the boy swipes at him like a dissatisfied cat, moments away from hissing, “Ah, our little Reggie, twas just a baby.”
Regulus winces at the very vivid, very realistic beating heart squirting blood all over the crime scene on the television, “I’m fine with gore. Remember two Christmases ago?”
Both boys fall silent, remembering when Regulus showed up at their door after a particularly bad fight with his father.
Rolling his eyes, Regulus shoves them with his shoulders, cradling his mug of tea as he takes another sip, “Oh don’t be such babies. I’m fine.”
“It’s gonna get bad again,” Barty whispers against the forearm Regulus has slung around the other man’s upper body.
Ignoring his rising suspicion, Regulus glances at Evan, mouthing, “The bad night?”
Evan nods in confirmation.
“What are you on about Crouch?”
Unlike him, Barty doesn’t rise to the jesting bait, instead avoiding Regulus’s gaze, “I’m- we’re- it’s not good.”
Evan and Regulus share a worried glance, both of them turning to the boy beside them.
“Barty,” Evan starts, always having been the gentler of the two, “what do you mean.”
Frighteningly, Barty sniffles, eyes shining with unshed tears as Regulus’s heart drops to his stomach. He can count on one hand the amount of times he’s seen Barty cry, the first of which on Barty’s nineteenth birthday when he showed up to Regulus’s house and they got ragingly drunk before spilling their deepest fears. Barty had talked for hours about his father, the constant pressure on his back to be the perfect heir, something that Regulus could relate to now that Sirius had left.
It’s terrifying, seeing his most stoic and joking friend reduced to terrified sniffles and hidden tears. His most guarded companion broken down to the soft exterior beneath. Regulus wants to find whoever broke him down and rip him limb from limb.
“That club of high society young men that are recruiting,” Barty begins, stopping for a moment to catch his breath as Regulus recalls his mother mentioning it to him. There’s some sort of initiation party for it and Regulus is invited (and expected to go)
“It’s not just a club.”
If the terror on Barty’s face makes Regulus uneasy, it absolutely rattles Evan, “Barty, what do you mean?”
“Their leader? He’s this guy everyone calls Voldemort.”