3
Peter was still locked up in that room.
He had, eventually, moved from his seat on the floor, but that was to search through the bathroom and attempt to make a shiv out of a toothbrush. But he hadn’t tried to stab Natasha with it when she went up to get it - he just handed it over to her. Tony wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
Pepper was pacing up and down in front of the monitor showing Peter. Natasha was talking with him again, telling him about her training in the Red Room. A small improvement - Peter was sitting in an armchair by the window, rather than on the floor. And he drank the hot chocolate without question.
“I can’t believe this,” Pepper muttered, her eyes glued to the screen as she paced. “That’s… that’s our Peter. But it’s not.”
“I know,” Tony murmured, coming to stand by her. “But T’challa and Shuri are on their way. Shuri got all that crap out of Bucky’s head, she’ll be able to do it for Peter.”
“God, I hope so,” Pepper whispered. Tony put an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into his side. “If we can get our little boy back…”
They watched as Natasha stood from her chair.
“I’ll be back a little later, alright?” Natasha said, collecting Peter’s empty mug. “I’ll bring you up some lunch.”
She left the room.
A moment later, she entered the lab that Tony, Pepper, and Steve were gathered in.
“How’s it going?” Pepper asked anxiously.
“I think his real memories are in there,” Natasha said. “They’ve tried to wipe away any memories of life before the Red Room, but I’ve noticed a couple times he seems to disappear into his head for a moment, and then he’s very confused when he comes back. I asked about one of them, and he mentioned a boy and a girl in a park.”
“Did he describe them at all?” Tony asked at once. “That could be his birthday when he went missing - his best friends were with him in a park.”
“He didn’t give much description,” Natasha shook her head. “But I think it could be beneficial if those friends came and talked to him. Are you in contact with them at all?”
“Not very often,” Tony said. “I send them birthday and Christmas gifts every year, and they’ve met with me a couple times while we look for him. It’s been a long time since they last saw him, but they still miss him.”
“Contact them, and their families,” Natasha said. “If Peter has good memories of them from before, seeing them and talking to them might bring them back. In the meantime, I think one of you should go talk to him.”
“One of us?” Pepper said hopefully.
Natasha nodded. “He knows of me from the Red Room, but I’m a stranger to him. He never knew me before. The same way his friends might trigger memories, you two talking to him might. I think you’d better go together, to support each other, and because Peter will have lots of memories of the two of you together.”
–
-{}-{}-{}-
–
Seven had decided the bed was safe. Natasha had kept telling him he was allowed to sit on it, once even doing so herself. He was laying across it when the door opened.
Seven lifted his head, and then sat bolt upright. Two people, not Natasha, entered. One was the dark haired man who’d yelled at him in the interrogation room. The other was a woman he’d never seen before, with long red hair. Seven was sure he’d never seen either of them before today, but they both seemed oddly familiar. The red haired woman made him think of strawberries for some reason, which was strange because there was nothing about her appearance or even smell that should have made that jump.
“Hello,” the woman spoke first. “My name is Pepper, this is my husband Tony.”
“Hi,” Seven said. “I’m Seven.”
For some reason, this seemed to upset Tony. His jaw clenched, and his arms stiffened. Seven couldn’t understand why he was mad about his name. He didn’t get mad when Pepper told him their names.
“Yes, Natasha told us,” Pepper said, giving Tony what seemed to be a warning look. “She told us that you trained at the same place she did.”
Seven shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so. She’s famous there. Infamous, really, I mean. They’re really mad she got away.”
“What do you suppose they’re thinking now that you’ve got away?” Tony said quietly.
Seven shrugged. “I dunno. They’re gonna come to get me, you know. But if they fail, I suppose they’ll probably just go grab someone else. They’re really set on ten experiments, I dunno why. They might try to just take us all out at once, you know? Like if I can’t be working for them, they won’t want me working for you.”
Pepper and Tony glanced at each other.
“You think they’d kill you if they can’t get you out of here?” Pepper asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Seven nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time it happened. They blew up a building once, when one of the widows went rogue. Took out her and about twenty other families. Her target was in an apartment, and she tried to help them escape instead, so they blew the whole place up.”
Tony and Pepper looked very horrified. Seven wasn’t sure why. Sure, casualties weren’t ideal, but they weren’t the end of the world.
“How many widows are there?” Tony asked.
“Um, I’m not sure,” Seven said. “Lots. There’s the older generation that went through training like us experiments did, but after that widow went rogue, they’ve got them all under some sort of mind control now, I don’t think they get any choice at all in what they do. Makes for a more efficient team. I’ve seen them training a couple times, they’re always in classes of twenty or so, but I really only talk to one. Her name’s Yelena, and it’s not really talking to her, because her mind’s not really behind the words, is it? But she’s the one that delivers messages to us if one of the superiors needs us somewhere. She’s a team leader a lot of the time, I’ve heard them say she’s the most accomplished widow they’ve ever had in the program. Except Natasha, but they don’t talk about her much, what with her defecting. I think they want us all to forget that happened.”
If Tony and Pepper had been horrified before, it was nothing to how they looked now. In fact, Pepper looked like she might just be sick right there. Seven felt like he might be sick. He knew he’d revealed too much - when the Red Room came for him, they might kill him whether they get him out or not. They’d certainly kill everyone else here for hearing it.
“Are you guys here to try to get ‘suppressed memories’ out of me?” Seven asked, putting air quotes around the words “suppressed memories” and trying to pretend he wasn’t fighting the urge to puke. “Because I heard you guys talking about that, and I really don’t think that there’s any memories in there.” He tapped his temple. “I’ve got nothing until I came to the Red Room.”
“You heard us talking?” Tony asked.
Fuck. He’d been trying not to reveal his hearing. He tried to gloss over it. “No memories at all until I’m ten.”
“Nothing at all?” Tony asked, looking like he knew exactly what Seven was doing but choosing to ignore it for the moment. “Do you think of anything specific when you see us?”
Seven studied them for a moment.
“You,” he said, pointing at Pepper. “You make me think of strawberries.”
The smallest twitch of a smile tugged at Tony’s mouth for a split second, before disappearing.
“You…” Seven pointed at Tony, hesitating for a moment. “I think of the smell of motor oil when I see you. And… and a little robot. With a claw arm. No clue where that comes from.”
Tony looked highly taken aback. “I have a little robot like that. I’ll show you sometime.”
Abruptly, a cool, female voice spoke from nowhere.
“Mr. Leeds and Miss Jones have arrived,” it said.
Tony stood. “Okay, Pe- er, Seven. We’ve got a couple kids your age we’d like you to meet, okay? We’ll bring them up in just a minute.”
Seven laid back on the bed. “Could you ask Natasha to come back, too?”
Pepper swallowed hard. “Yeah. Yeah, we’ll send her with them.”
–
-{}-{}-{}-
–
“Hey, Ned, MJ,” Tony greeted the two teenagers in the room. They, like everyone else, were staring at the screen.
“Mr. Stark,” Ned said.
“Is that really Peter?” MJ asked immediately, pointing at the screen.
They looked different from how Tony remembered. His memories of them were mostly from elementary school. Five years makes a lot of difference in kids this young.
“Yeah, we’re pretty sure,” Pepper nodded. She sounded as though she was making a great effort not to cry. “He’s… we think he’s mentioned you.”
“You need to be prepared,” Bruce said. “While that’s Peter physically, he’s not in there right now. He was kidnapped by the same organisation that trained Natasha. The Black Widow,” he clarified, when the teens looked a little confused. “They’ve brainwashed him, essentially. He has virtually no real memories of anything before his tenth birthday, when they got him. He’s mentioned having strange glimpses. He mentioned a boy and a girl in a park, specifically, and we think that’s you two, on the birthday he disappeared. We think talking to you two might help.”
“What do you mean, brainwashed?” Ned asked, sounding fearful. “What did they do?”
“The most we can get out of him is being ‘programmed’,” Natasha stepped in. She looked strange. She’d been handling the whole situation with an amazing calm, being very soothing and gentle with both Peter, and with Tony. But now she seemed very tense, her jaw tightly clenched, an emotion Tony couldn’t place brewing behind her eyes. When she spoke, however, it was in the same calm, gentle voice she used when speaking with Peter. “We’ve worked out a bit of the details. He thinks his name is Seven-”
“Seven?” MJ interrupted. “Why would he think his name is Seven?”
“He’s part of a group of experiments the Red Room has apparently been developing,” Natasha said. “There’s ten in all, and they’ve just named them in the order they arrived.”
“Experiments?” Ned asked.
“Peter has been given… enhancements, for lack of a better word,” Natasha said. “We know he’s at least as strong as Captain America, possibly stronger. He’s able to climb right up the sides of walls, like an insect. A comment he made to Tony makes us believe he has enhanced hearing. He can probably hear us talking right now.”
“He’s been being used by the Red Room as the Spider-Man,” Bruce said. “You’ve probably seen him in the news.”
Ned and MJ gaped at them. They both looked extremely shaken.
“The assassin?” Ned exclaimed. “That guy who swings around killing people is Peter?”
“No,” Natasha said firmly. “It is someone created from scratch by psychopaths using Peter’s body.”
“What you need to understand before going in there,” Bruce said hurriedly. “The boy in there does not know you. He doesn’t know anything except the Red Room, and he doesn’t know what he’s been doing and what’s been done to him is wrong. From our best understanding of this ‘programming’, he’s been tortured, experimented on, had his memory wiped, and been separated from any real human contact. He knows almost nothing about the other children in his group of ‘experiments’, and less about the Widows still being created, despite living with them for the last five years. He’s essentially been living in a torture chamber desguised as a school, home, and training facility.”
Ned and MJ both looked sick.
“We’re not telling you this to scare you,” Natasha said softly. “We’re telling you this to prepare you. If you go in there - and yes, if, because if it’s not something you’re comfortable with you absolutely don’t have to do it - if you go in there, he may speak about absolutely despicable things in a very casual way. He mentioned a Widow defecting, and the Red Room blowing up an apartment building full of people to kill her, and had no idea why Tony or Pepper would be surprised by that. He may speak of things that happened to him, and he thinks it’s completely normal. And you can’t have a big reaction to those things, because doing so will likely just close him off and make him shut everything out.”
“We have a couple friends coming in,” Steve spoke for the first time in a while. “My friend was taken by these same people, he was brainwashed and turned into a mindless killer, much like Peter was. It’s not exactly the same, but these friends were able to remove the programming that these people put into my friend’s head, and we’re hoping they’ll be able to do the same for Peter.”
“I know this is a lot,” Pepper said gently. “You don’t have to go in there if you don’t want to.”
Ned and MJ looked at each other. They hesitated.
“Is he dangerous to us?” MJ finally asked. “I mean, is he going to… if he’s supposed to be an assassin…”
“Theoretically, I suppose he could be,” Natasha said. “He’s been very calm and composed with us. I’ve spoken with him a lot, and he just sits and talks to me. And I’ll be in there with you the whole time, and everyone else will be right here, so if anything… goes wrong, we’ll get you two out of there completely safely.”
The teens fell into another long silence.
“Will it help him?” Ned asked finally. “Will talking to him, sitting with him… will it help?”
“We’re not sure,” Bruce admitted. “But we think there’s a chance that you two will be able to bring up more memories of his past. The more he remembers, the more he doubts the truth of what the Red Room has been telling him, the better it’ll go when our friends get here to work with him.”
“Then yes,” MJ said immediately. “Absolutely, we’ll go in there. If there’s any chance of getting our Peter back, then we’ll do anything you need.”
“Okay,” Tony said. “Natasha’s going to take you two-”
“Just a moment,” Natasha said. “I need a moment with Tony, and then I’ll take you guys up. Tony…”
Completely bemused, Tony followed Natasha out of the room, down a hall, and into a conference room.
“That Widow he was talking to you about,” Natasha said, her voice very carefully controlled, not looking at Tony. “What did he say her name was?”
Tony gave her an odd look. They both knew there was a good chance that Natasha remembered everything that was said better than Tony did, but he was willing to play along. Clearly, something about this subject had rattled Natasha.
“Yelena,” he said carefully. “He said that she was one of the ones they were testing total mind control on, but she was also the one he and the other kids came into contact with most.”
Natasha let out a breath, and then turned to face Tony.
“I went to the Red Room twice,” she said. “Once when I was four, and then they took me out, and brought me back when I was eleven. In between, I was placed with a… family, you could call it. Molina, who developed weapons and toxins for the Red Room, played our mother. Elesei, who was the Red Guardian, an attempt to replicate Steve’s super-serum, played our father. And I had a little sister, who they took back with me. Yelena.”
Tony blinked, taken aback. He’d had no idea she’d ever had a family, even a fake one.
“When I destroyed the Red Room,” Natasha paused. “When I thought I’d destroyed the Red Room, I also thought Yelena got away and just didn’t want to see me. But if she’s still in there… We’ve got to get her out. We’ve got to get all of them out, Tony. All the children, all the Widows, and we need to shut the Red Room down for good.”
“I know,” Tony said immediately. “I was planning on it. We’re going to get them all out, kill the bastards running this thing, and we’ll… we’ll get your sister out of there.”
Natasha looked at him for a moment, before nodding curtly, and leaving the room.