“Two days.”
“Enhance audio,” Tony murmured. Leaning forward in his seat with his hands clenched tightly together in his lap, Tony watched the same scene again, this time with an audience to help him judge it without his incredibly heavy bias.
His heavy bias that meant this man on the screen, this man touching his son, was going to die in an incredibly painful and creative way if the guys all agreed with Tony’s initial analysis.
“Can’t you come with me?” Harry asked the man, his voice soft despite the slight static coming through the security footage.
“Planes are fun, don’t be worried. You’ll like flying. Plus, someone needs to stay here to keep You-Know-Who and You-Know-Who off your trail.”
“Pause,” Bruce said as Harry scoffed on the screen. He spun in his chair to face Tony, who was sitting in the back of the office with a dark expression on his face. “Who is ‘you-know-who’?”
Tony was too furious and anxious to even make the obvious joke there (‘you know’). He shrugged a shoulder, the movement uncomfortable with the stiffness he held himself and tried to control his tone while he explained what he did know.
“Harry has no criminal case, he’s been implicated in zero crimes, and isn’t even reported as a missing person,” Tony told Bruce, Steve, and Clint, the three members of his team that were home. “I think it’s bullshit, I think this fucking freak was feeding him a line to try and scare him.”
“What? ‘I’m keeping the cops off your trail so you owe me’?” Clint asked. He had his hands laced behind his head and a thoughtful expression on his face. “Harry seem like the kind of kid to fall for scare tactics like that?”
“Yes,” Tony and Steve said simultaneously.
“What?” Tony didn’t even have it in him to tease the captain for agreeing with him. “You do?”
Tony had gotten the distinct impression that Harry didn’t make a stellar first impression with the guys. It was a phenomenal performance, in Tony’s opinion, but they hadn’t came back to Tony’s floor and had made themselves sparse since Harry first met them a few days ago so he assumed that they didn’t agree.
Which made it a pretty damn quiet few days.
Tony thought that their shopping excursion would have shortened some of the distance between him and Harry, but he didn’t think it shortened it more than an inch.
And it was approximately 3,459 miles to start with, timed by every year that Harry lived as an orphan. So one inch versus 44,967 miles was a start, but a damned insignificant one.
Harry was quiet, withdrawn, nervous the whole time they were out. He’d lost his sarcastic front around the same time he’d thrown an apple at Tony’s head and wound up shattering the TV and never picked it back up until the next morning. As much as nobody else seemed to appreciate the act, Tony preferred the dry sarcasm over the anxious kid he spent the afternoon with.
When they got back to the tower, and Harry quickly thanked Tony for the clothes and phone he’d insisted he have, Tony went to his office to think while Harry hid away in his room.
And the more Tony thought, the more pissed off he became.
What looked like a bruise from a fight had a lot more grim implications when Tony paired it with the handprint shaped bruise on Harry’s upper arm that had been hidden beneath his hoodie for his first day. Tony moved those two pieces to the way his kid had complete freaked out over an obvious accident and immediately said how his ‘dangerous friend’ would kill Tony if Tony hurt Harry. He added another piece an hour later— Petunia Dursley hadn’t seen her nephew in years.
Tony had called her when he got back from shopping, after he’d been stewing in his curiosity and anger for a couple of hours, and she claimed that Harry had been taken ‘by friends of his parents’ when he was eleven, and that was why he never attended school and didn’t have so much as a single vaccination record on file past that age.
She’d also agreed to sign anything Tony wanted so he could claim custody. She’d been hesitant at first, but the heavy bribe that came along with the NDA she’d have to sign had cleared that right up.
The piece of the puzzle that Petunia Dursley gave Tony made an image that had him certain that he was going to transform into his own Hulk as furious as he’d been.
So, before he flew to London, found this piece of shit that Harry considered a friend and ripped the limbs off his body, Tony needed a second opinion. If only because he knew the team would help him make sure this was the most painful possible death in history once they saw what he did.
Steve was staring at Tony now, hesitancy written all over his eternally youthful face. “I wanted to come talk to you after you had some time alone with Harry, to get to know each other, but… but that kid is terrified of something, Tony.”
“I couldn’t agree more, Cap,” Tony said vehemently. He waved his hand at the screen and nodded toward it. “Watch and see what it is. Play.”
The four of them watched as the little scene continued in a London airport roughly four days ago.
All Tony had hoped to achieve by stealing and digging through the footage was some hint about Harry’s life, he didn’t expect the bombshell it exposed. He felt guilty exposing the kid’s secret like he was, even if it was to three people Tony trusted most in the galaxy, but he was going to need backup.
“What if he won’t help?” Harry was asking. “What if—”
Tony saw red when the scumbag put his hand on Harry’s shoulder, instantly causing his son to flinch, and tried to soothe his fears.
“Tony Stark’s a good guy, kiddo. He’s- he’s going to love you, I just know it. I bet he’ll be thrilled to find out he’s got such a brilliant son.”
Tony was thrilled to have a son. Tony was thrilled to have Harry as a son. Tony was not thrilled to have that piece of human garbage saying it to his son though.
“Pause,” Clint ordered it this time. He spun his chair in a complete circle before turning it to face Tony. “You think this guy is scaring the kid and singing both of your praises at the same time? Weird combo there.”
“Not if he wants something from Tony…” Bruce said slowly, thinking the situation through. He pulled his glasses off and looked over at Tony apologetically after running his hand down his face wearily. “I thought he was twitchy because of us, being in a new place and surrounded by new people, and the aliens, and all the other weird stuff, but…”
“But he was twitchy in London too,” Steve finished for him in a harder than typical tone. His expression wasn’t soft or tired at all, not like Bruce’s. Steve was obviously was growing more and more indignant by the moment and Tony thought maybe this would be the time that he convinced Mister ‘Justice for All’ to go dole out justice off the books with him.
“Play.”
“He’s not my dad—”
Tony was still too pissed and focused on the disgusting hand on his son’s shoulder to even acknowledge the phantom pain in his chest at Harry’s words.
“Blood doesn’t make family. Right?”
“Right.”
They watched the rest of the footage uninterrupted, and Tony’s blood pressure was at an all time high when he saw the adoring smile his son gave that man just before the man went to lift his arm, probably to wave back, and the footage cut out.
“‘Don’t kill any muggles while I’m gone, twelve was plenty’,” Bruce repeated Harry’s parting words after the screen smoothly slid back into the ceiling and the lights in the office kicked on. “What’s that mean?”
“No idea.” Tony put both his hands in his hair and tugged at it, frustrated and infuriated beyond all reason. “The only thing I can think of is it’s some sort of secret code, but Harry thinks that he’s dangerous, dangerous enough to kill someone for hurting him.”
“So the guy cares about the kid?” Clint said dismissively. “So what? Tony’d probably kill for him too and he barely knows the little dick.”
“Don’t call him a dick,” Tony spat angrily. “Something messed up happened to him, I just know it.”
He hadn’t known it, not really, because for a genius, he was apparently a moron. It was probably a good thing that Harry broke the TV because otherwise Tony never would have gotten to witness his mini-panic attack over it and a lot of shit wouldn’t have came into focus for him.
And suddenly all of Harry’s quirks, like his nonexistent eating and sleeping patterns, had a lot darker connotations to them.
Clint looked at Steve for backup, but Steve only shook his head at him. For once, he was firmly with Tony.
“Fine.” Clint sighed and kicked his chair in another circle. “I guess I’ll play devils advocate here since no one else is. Did someone smack the kid? Yeah. Do we know it was that guy? No. Did someone take the kid from his aunt a few years ago? Yeah. Do we know it was that guy? No.”
“You’re forgetting the fact that this man is, by Harry’s own accidental admissions, on the run from the law and clearly someone who knew Harry’s mom well enough to know that Tony was his father,” Bruce pointed out illogically. “If the aunt said it was one of Harry’s parents’ friends, this guy does seem the most likely.”
“That doesn’t prove he hurt the kid though,” Clint argued, really just pissing Tony off more. “Let’s say that Harry did really get in a fight—”
“With someone big enough to leave a giant handprint shaped bruise on his arm,” Tony snarled.
Clint stretched his neck and grimaced. “It could be a coincidence, is all I’m saying.”
“I think there’s reasonable suspicion for long term abuse,” Bruce said. He held his glasses in one hand while he had his face buried in the other. “Tony, I’m sorry, I just heard your attitude coming from the kid’s mouth and god knows he had a lot dropped on him, I didn’t…”
Tony waved him off, uninterested in apologies. “If you want to apologize, bring the big guy with me to London so we can pick this guy up and drop him, preferable from fifty feet up.”
Bruce lifted his head to smile wryly. “You want to go kill him because you think he’s been hitting Harry?”
“Nope.” Tony grabbed the packets he’d printed out and tossed a copy to each of the guys. “I am going to go kill him because I think he’s been grooming and molesting Harry for years.” Tony pointed at the packets when three shocked faces turned to him. “Gentlemen, meet Alexander Ramsey, two time convicted child molester and receiver of multiple counts of statutory rape of victims young enough that charges couldn’t stick.” Tony’s voice was shaking with fury when he added, “And guess what his victim preference is?”
Steve had already opened the packet and his eyes swore vengeance as he looked up from the first page, the photo of the man in the video putting his hand on Tony’s son’s shoulder.
“Prepubescent boys?”
“Prepubescent boys,” Tony agreed. “And now that Harry’s getting too old—”
“He’s manipulating Harry into helping him get the paperwork to flee the country before he gets caught,” Clint breathed, finally seeing the big fucking picture. “Fuck.”
“Fuck,” Tony agreed.
“So what are we doing?” Steve asked. “Call SHIELD and let them pick the guy up?”
“Fuck that.” Clint was on his feet and instinctually reaching for a weapon in an instant. “We get Natasha’s ass back here from Rome and we go kill the sick son of a bitch.”
In another historical moment, Steve didn’t even look poised to argue or correct anyone’s language. He looked every bit of his 95 years old as he stood up.
“Let’s do it,” he agreed. “Let’s keep that dirt ball from hurting any more kids.”
“Wait!” Bruce’s hands were trembling, but he didn’t look green yet, so Tony assumed he was still in thought mode instead of the currently more helpful ‘Hulk out and smash a mother fucker’ mode. “We can’t go yet, Tony.”
“We can,” Tony corrected him. “If we leave now, we can be in London and have enough time to kill Ramsey before Harry wakes up.”
“It’ll take longer than that and you know it,” Bruce said with an annoying amount of logic that just wasn’t needed in that moment. “When does Pepper get back?”
“Not for two days.”
“Let’s go then,” Bruce said. “Nat should be back tomorrow night, Pepper gets home the next day, then we can leave Pepper here with Harry so he isn’t alone while we’re gone. This city, hell the whole damn country, is new, do you really want to leave him here by himself?”
To kill a man who hurt him? Maybe.
“Two days,” Tony agreed after a moment of contemplation. “The second the girls are home, we’re finding that man and we are ripping him apart.”
It was a mark of their team strength, or some other sappy nonsense, that they all agreed.
Tony put a mental timer on Alexander Ramsey’s life and then jumped into planning mode with his three friends on how to help Harry in the meantime.