Chapter 8
Summer after fourth year/before fifth
The Summer after Harry's fourth year Pepper spends a lot of time shoving a 7-month-old Morgan into the arms of a distraught Harry. She read somewhere that people are less likely to break down whilst holding a baby and after trying it once and drawing a tired smile from the teen Pepper had taken this suggestion as law.
At the start of summer both she and Tony had almost had a heart attack when Sirius turned up with a quiet and pale Harry in toe. He had been so quiet and withdrawn it had been like all the progress they'd made a year ago had evaporated like half the population had the year before that.
He'd been the picture of politeness. All shy smiles and helping out with chores but all of his characteristic cheek and curiosity seemed to be replaced with glassy eyes and a clenched jaw.
---
Summer 2023
After his confrontation with Harry, Peter returns to the hotel in a daze. There are a million thoughts and feelings flitting through his head and he can't figure out how he feels about any of it.
When he arrives Mr Harrington pulls him into a bewildering embrace. He pulls back from Peter and pumps his fist, "yes! You're not dead,"
"Uh-"
"You don't happen to know where Harry is, do you? He hasn't returned either."
"I saw him just before, he's probably just getting some air."
"Excellent! Although could you message him and tell him to come back soon? He shouldn't be out when it's dark."
Peter nods absently and heads to his room.
---
"The trip's over, there are monsters coming out of the ground everywhere we go, of course, our parents would want us home."
Peter stares at Ned with a sinking feeling in his gut. He thought he was home free. Isn't that how these things are supposed to work? The hero saves the day and then gets the girl? How is he going to make any progress with MJ if the trip is about to be over?
He glances at MJ's door and thinks “it's now or never.”
---
When MJ agrees to wander Prague with him, Peter's heart skips a beat. Finally- this is his chance.
Her hair looks gorgeous under the muted street lights and it takes all his willpower not to reach out and grab her hand.
He's pulled the black dahlia necklace he bought in Venice out of his pocket and is just working up the nerve to tell her how he feels, how he's been since for a long time when-.
"MJ I-"
"Am Spiderman"
Peter blanches, his minding switching from excited panic to nervous dread "What!? No, I'm not Spiderman."
Mj shrugs, insistent "it's kinda obvious."
Then MJ proceeds to give a ridiculously accurate rundown of all the ways he is obviously Spiderman and his heart sinks. What kind of hero is he that can't even manage to admit his feelings? Or have enough stealth to conceal his identity.
He tries to use the new costume Fury gave him to conceal his identity. He claims he couldn't be Spiderman when it was Nightmonkey, dressed in black that fought the monster earlier that evening. However, she puts the nail in the coffin and produces a web covered piece of metal from her bag asking ‘does nightmokey use the same webs as Spiderman?’
He's about to attempt to salvage something from the conversation when MJ fumbles and drops the metal she was holding. There's a loud crackling sound before an image of the fire demon from earlier flashes in the sky.
"Is that a hologram?"
"Yeah," Peter says breathless and dumbstruck.
He reaches to pick up the piece of metal, "I think it is a hologram,but it's really advanced."
"Does that mean-”
"That the elementals are fake?" he finishes dread pooling in his gut.
"Who would do that?" MJ questions
Suddenly, Peter is struck with a flood of memories. Harry drawing his wand on Quentin almost immediately, his quiet confession that for wizards like him the colour green was associated with death. He remembers Harry telling him to fuck himself before barreling after Mr Beck after Peter gave him EDITH.
"Shit."
"What's going on?"
"I messed up, " he confesses, panic crawling in his throat. "Harry's in trouble."
---
Summer after fourth year/before fifth
One day, Pepper finds Harry crying in his room. He's sitting on a red doona cover with his back pressed to the backboard of his bed and his knees folded to his chest. He has his face pressed to his knees and his body shakes with sobs.
Pepper sits beside Harry on the bed.
"I'm not sure how much you know about what happened with Thanos but you should know that your Father was really torn up about it."
Sher reaches out a hand to stroke his hair. He doesn't react. "Before Thanos he never met a problem he couldn’t solve before and then suddenly half the world had been turned to dust, Peter had gone with them and there was nothing he could do."
Harry makes a wounded noise.
"It wasn't Tony's fault. It wasn't anybody's fault but Thanos' but he and Thor and all of the hero types felt like it was and it nearly tore them apart. It's still tearing a lot of them apart."
She pauses for a second, remembering the angry set of Clint's shoulders and how Thor is slowly but surely slipping into a pattern of listless melancholy.
"They learnt a hard truth that day, that sometimes despite your best efforts, things turn out awful anyway."
She gently lifts his chin so that she can stare into his red-rimmed eyes. "That doesn't make it your fault. Just because you feel like you might be the most equipped to solve a problem doesn't make it your responsibility. The fact that they, that you interfere at all is proof of their courage. But it isn't their burden to bear alone and it certainly isn't their fault when the weight of the world becomes that little bit much."
Harry freezes for a second, breathing ragged, before launching himself at her. She strokes his necks and whispers soothing words as he sobs into her shoulder.
---
Summer 2023
Beck is testing out his new toy. Running drone stimulations for his grand finale with his crew.
He chuckles to himself. EDITH and Stark's son all in one day. Stark must be roiling in his grave.
There's something like euphoria building in his chest, finally he will no longer be overlooked, finally the opportunity to spit on Stark's legacy.
So of course that's when everything goes wrong.
The projection of his suit flickers and when he inquires about why that's happening William informs him that a drone returned without its projector.
He says it blithely with the kind of naivety that sets Beck's teeth on edge. Peter Parker's naivety was a gift from God but naivety from his people is a liability he can't afford.
"That's evidence," he spits, "it's going to tell people what we're doing and how we're doing it. I am trying to fool 7 billion people here, including Nick Fury, who happens to be the most paranoid dangerous man on the planet. If he catches on before I kill him he's going to put a bullet in my head. Nobody wants a bullet in their head, right?"
If William weren't so useful Beck would very much like to put a bullet in his head. Alas, he has bigger goals in mind.
They use EDITH to locate the missing projector and find it in the hands of Peter Parker, because apparently any kid of Stark's biological otherwise, just has to stick their nose where it doesn’t belong. To think, he was almost rooting for his kid. His plans for his girlfriend had been mildly endearing but not nearly endearing enough to jeopardize Beck's plans.
---
Summer after fourth year/before fifth year
After his conversation with Pepper Harry sits down in the living room with her, Tony and Sirius and opens up about what happened. The scene is eerily reminiscent of the conversation last year, when he and Pepper sat Harry down to tell him about Morgan.
He looks to where she and Tony are curled together at the opposite end of the blue sofa he's sat on. "You guys know about Voldemort right?"
Sirius, who is sitting on Harry’s left on a single seat couch cuts in, "Remus and I have filled them in some, but it might help if you tell it from the start anyway."
Harry takes a deep breath, "The best muggle explanation for Voldemort is that he was a lot like Hitler, except instead of anti-Semitism and eugenics he went after muggles and people born of muggles."
Tony speaks up, "Lily told me there was a war. She said that was why she had to leave, because her friend died."
Harry looks to Sirius.
"That would have been Marlene, Lily's best friend." Sirius' eyes have gone distant. "You would have liked her, Harry and she would have adored you. She got into more trouble than James and I both."
Harry blows out a breath, "There was a lapse in the war, after my first birthday. For reasons that have never been explained to me, Voldemort tried to kill me that night and, obviously, failed. Somehow the curse he used rebounded and he was left weak and bodiless."
Harry says it so matter-of-factly that Pepper has to turn it over in her head a few times before the gravity of the situation becomes apparent, "He tried to kill a baby?"
Tony's hand tightens around hers.
Harry tilts his head to the side, "My parents, well," Harry seems to struggle with what to refer to them as.
"James and Lily died trying to protect him," Sirius supplies. Tony flinches.
"Right," Harry acknowledges fiddling with the edges of a pillow.
He clears his throat and looks up, avoiding Tony's eyes "He came back this year. During the third task," Harry's eyes go glassy, "He came back and he killed Cedric and he used my blood to make a new body." He says this in a rush, voice wavering in a way that tells her he was struggling to keep the emotion out of his voice."
"Anyway," Harry's voice cracks, "now that he's back the ministry is denying it and because I was the only one who saw what happened they have the public pretty fooled."
"You were the only one who saw?" Pepper asked. "Where was everybody else?"
Tony sits up, eyes intent on Harry.
"There was a portkey. It's a teleportation device that activated when I touched it. It took Cedric and I to a graveyard."
"Where you faced your parents' murderer. Alone?" Tony asks slowly.
Harry shrugs. "Something like that. Cedric was there. Until he wasn't. There was some weird magic thingy with our wands that conjured some of Voldemort's victims." Harry offers a watery smile. "Mum was there, so was James.' His smile turns wistful, "only for a second."
---
When everything is said and done. Tony wraps Harry in an embrace, presses a kiss to his forehead and spends a long time just holding him. Pepper and Sirius leave to give them some privacy and Pepper spends some time considering the letters they received this year, and how none of them had any indication of the kind of danger Harry was in. She considers this and considers what Harry said and wonders how many horrors he didn't share with them.
---
Summer 2023
For Peter, meeting Quentin had been like a breath of fresh air. Since Tony's death there was a whole in his life that had been there long before he had ever gotten involved in the "Stark internship."
Quentin had been everything he was looking for, somebody to rely on when he bit off more than he could chew, somebody to offer him reassurance and support and above all else, somebody who was firmly 100% on his side. He usually had Aunt May but since he became Spiderman officially she's felt more and more separated.
So the discovery of his deception hits him like a punch in the gut. There's a part of him that wants to curl-up in a ball and wait until a time when he doesn't feel so wretched.
Then he remembers the Starks at Tony's funeral. The way Pepper's eyes had stared listlessly towards the horizon and her arm had tightened around Harry like a lifeline. He Remembers how Morgan had pressed her face into Harry's collarbone as the boy held her to his chest and he pressed tear-filled eyes into her hair.
He thinks that if he gives up now and lets something terrible happen to Harry, there will never come a time when he doesn't feel wretched.
It's that thought that gives him the resolve to fill in MJ and Nedd and to form a plan to go find Nick fury in Berlin.
---
Summer after fourth year/before fifth year
That Summer, when Harry quietly confesses to Natasha how helpless he had felt, how being so powerless over his own circumstances had terrified him, she finally agrees to teach him how to throw a punch.
---
Somewhat ironically, it ends up being Steve not Nat that teaches Harry self defense. Nat moves with the kind of disciplined grace that only comes with years of training and is at a loss at how to teach Harry the basics. She offers to teach Harry ballet but Harry had heard horror stories from Hermione about blistered feet and angry teachers so he respectfully declines.
So they ask Steve, who turns out to have far more in common with Harry than his Malfoy-ish looks first suggested.
"If Bucky were here he would cry at the sight of you." Steve informs him as they stretch, "You're basically me circa the super-soldier serum. Short, scrappy, stubborn as hell."
Harry bristles but keeps stretching.
---
Summer 2023
Beck pulls up a stool in front of the Stark kid where he’s currently tied to a radiator.
His face is slack, likely still recovering from the harsh thwack Janice gave him to the back of the head. With his eyes closed the kid looks more like Tony than ever, it weren't for his off-putting green eye-stare Beck thinks he might have cottoned on to his identity sooner. Bless Peter Parker's naïve soul for filling in the gaps, if it weren't for him none of his plans would have come to fruition. Shame he needs to die.
He's never been one for murder. Especially not the murder of children. He was even starting to respect Harry, the kid had a healthy dose of paranoia and none of the wide-eyed eagerness that made Parker so obnoxious. Too bad Tony Stark poisons everything he touches. Too bad these kids know too much. Too bad there's nothing he wouldn't do for revenge.
He would kill the kid now- put a bullet between his eyes and send his body to Tony's widow -but he's had an idea; one that kills two birds with one stone and provides some poetic justice.