Out Of This World

Peter wishes that he could fly, so he could jump and go as far away from here as he wanted. The stars seem so far away, but in realty Peter’s been around them and they’re not as grand as some might believe. In fact, space is terrifying. It’s vast, cold, unforgiving, and it makes Peter feel like nothing if he looks around for too long. He’s just one thing in a universe of trillions, what gives him the right to feel anything but ordinary?

Tony once treated him like he was something special, as if he cared for no-one else like he did for him. He loved Pepper, but he also loved Peter in a father-son sort of way. Peter’s experienced that love before but having it again and having it so strong is something else.

But then he had that vision. His dreams were haunting, taunting him that all of this was false and having a loved one wasn’t in the cards for an alien. A ‘man’ so far out of place that even his heart would never be accepted in a place like this.

The feeling in his heart when he saw Tony talking so openly with his kidnapper made his stomach twist into a tight knot, made him feel sick and turned his face green. His hands started shaking, his legs wobbly, and he ran before he could think straight. There’s not another feeling quite like betrayal. Anger, sadness, happiness, he can deal with them. Other emotions are like an old family friend, somebody you’d miss but sometimes you remember why you don’t speak anymore. But betrayal is something of a stranger, and- oh, wow- it’s like every bad dream he’s had cannot compare. Tony could’ve reached into his heart and torn it out, and it still would’ve felt the same.

Now, he’s in a place he doesn’t know. There’s a large stretch of forest miles away from the compound, and it’s just the place Peter thinks he could hide. It’s hidden, filled with trees he can climb, and might have some food available if he looks hard enough.

If his diet consists of insects and the odd small mammal that he’ll have to sacrifice, he’ll have to deal with it. Going out and grabbing a burger is impossible. Firstly, he has no money. Secondly, it’s not safe to be out in the open. Who knows when a man in armour will fly down to him, picking him up to pretend he cares once more?

Therefore, he walks in amongst the trees and takes a seat on a log. Looking up through the open canopy of trees, he studies the sun and wonders what time of day it is. He’s going to be here for a long time, it’s best he gets used to it.

Tony, one week later

“There’s no update?” Tony says, biting his lip as Friday relies everything she could find on Peter’s whereabouts for that afternoon.

Tony shakes his head to himself as Friday tells him ‘no’, trying to pretend this isn’t as frustrating and terrifying as he finds it. He paces to the other side of the lab, looking at their blueprints for a fake superhero suit Peter thought of one evening. They were going to make it one day.

“Fuck, Pete. Where the hell are you?” he mumbles to himself.

Tony huffs, sitting down at his desk. Putting his head in his hands, he stares at the white paint on his desk. He tries so hard not to start crying, but then he imagines how hard it is out there. What if they captured Pete again? What if he’s in a lab right now getting prodded with all sorts? He’d think Tony’s behind it, and he’ll probably die thinking that nobody alive loved him… and it’s simply not true.

If Peter was here, he’d be sat on the desk or on the other side of Tony’s lab. With him, he’d be attentive, happy, and ranting about new things he found on Earth that he loves. He was beginning to understand himself, developing underneath Tony’s nose and all of him felt so proud to see it happening.

He was a funny kid, a bit too much like Tony in some senses. He’d never talk too much to the team, which was a boast Tony always used whenever they had an argument. If Steve said he didn’t have a leg to stand on, it would be ‘hm, if I’m not good- then why does Peter love me so much?’. It was always a bit of a low blow using the kid as a pawn of sorts, but, hey, it worked! And it made him feel good for all of a second.

Tony gets up from the desk, grabbing the framed photo of them both. He stares at it for a while, before putting it down. Knowing he’d throw it out of frustration and break the only intact copy he had… he couldn’t do that. Because with that photo, a little bit of Pete was still with him. Plus, he had plenty of other stuff to throw around the room in frustration instead.

Tony walks upstairs, hoping he’d ignore this feeling in his heart if he could get out of the lab and away from the centre of their memories. Steve’s waiting outside, as if he was about to walk in, and they bounce into each other.

“Tony!” Steve says, biting his lip, scared that he’s hurt the man in front of him (he’s vulnerable recently, and they’ve all noticed it). “Are you okay?

At the same time, Tony yells “Rogers!” out of frustration. “Watch where you’re going with all of that- you know how much your pecs are a hazard.”

“…Sorry?”

“Yeah, right. Anyway- why were you so close to my door and what have I missed this time?”

Steve looks down, “uh, Pierce got out of his holding cell. Probably bribed some of the guards, but we’ll never know which one. Last thing we know, he was walking out and heading-,”

“Heading after Peter? Of course, he is,” Tony says, running his hand through his hair with a stressed groan. “Fuck sake. Steve, we can’t. We can’t let him do that, man. If he gets him then- then he’ll-,”

“I know,” Steve sighs sadly, “we’ll get him, Tony, and we’ll get Peter back and if we just tell him what happened… he’ll understand.”

“Maybe we… don’t?”

“What? Why?”

Tony looks at Steve, and then back at the sofa where he held Peter as they watched a film together. Then he remembers the broken look on his face when he ran, and he realises that the boy is far better without him in his life. He needs stability, and isn’t that what his aunt is? The kid should’ve never stayed here, he should’ve gone back as soon as Tony took him from Pierce. Then, maybe, it wouldn’t have been this hard on Tony after he inevitably broke everything they had. He could barely be a friend, never mind a dad.

“Tony, you’re not making any sense. You’re worrying me. All this effort to go and look for the kid, and the first thing you’ll do when you find him is let him go? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t want to let him go! I love him, and that’s why I have to!” Tony shouts.

He’s breathing hard, heart beating against his chest like an out of rhythm drum. Steve sees it, because he always does, and Tony lets his eyes close for only a second or two. Looking into Steve’s pitiful eyes is too painful because all he feels like is some spectacle, a mess that everyone knows will never get better. And all he wants is to be happy again. Why does feeling good take a journey for him, and nothing for others? What did he do that makes it impossible to just… feel?

“Please, just leave me alone. And stop looking at me like that. It must be so weird for you to see me care about another person like this. But I promise. Steve, I promised him that I’d look after him and he saw me talking to his kidnapper? There will be no trust there, and he’ll be so hurt that he might not want me to come looking for him. So, he’s going back to his aunt. Where he belongs.”

“He loves you just as much as his aunt, I think he deserves a say in this…”

“Steve, stay out of this. Okay? It’s not any of your business.”

“But if it hurts you?”

“Then it’s especially not any of your business,” Tony tells him, before he walks straight past the other and up to his bedroom. Because if there’s no news on Peter, then he’s going to sleep to pretend he’s right there beside him.

Peter

An unmarked, white van trails beside Peter for at least ten minutes the second he leaves the forest. He thinks it might be okay to try and walk somewhere else, but maybe it’s not. The van never speeds up to get past him, just trailing slowly… and slowly. Other cars overtake it, yet it stays the same speed. Constant. Maybe it’s broken down, or perhaps it’s something more sinister. There’s got to be something going on here.

Peter stops. The van does too.

It’s like a crappy horror film, and if his life had a soundtrack than all he’d be listening to right now is that dramatic organ music. He only knows of those because of Tony… and all that fun they had together before it was all over… before he had to go.

Peter runs- the people in the van get out and they run just as fast.

Take a breath, Peter, he says to himself as his legs move by themselves. He jumps through water, leaves, anything you’d find in a forest, and eventually finds himself out in an open field which is caged in by some tall fences. There’s nowhere to hide, and they’re still coming for him, so he has to keep going and tell himself that he’d make the jump.

“Please!” he shouts, as he gets so out of breath that he must turn around for a second or two, “no, no, I can’t- I can’t go through all of that again. I just want to be normal! Please!”

They get closer, like a bunch of brainwashed soldiers with no free will. Their eyes are scary, their pupils little and only the white of their eyes showing. Peter runs backwards, picking up some speed. But some of them catch up, and he knows he has to fight to keep himself safe. He hasn’t done this in a while, his movements sloppy compared to how good he was underneath his mama’s guidance. But he’s still good.

Like a wave on top of the water, he moves easily around the three men that gained some distance on him. Working with his feet, he jumps and kicks and two of them go down within half a minute. The third is more of a challenge, the man standing over a foot taller than him.

“…I’m not- I’m not weak, sir, and I’m definitely not on this earth for your kind to experiment on me,” he tells them, using a move he copied from black widow to get the man on the floor.

After pinning him down, he raises his fist, and he punches over and over just enough to knock the man out. He’d be apologising if he wasn’t so scared. Fighting has never really been his ‘style’, so having to knock these people out makes some guilt bubble in his gut- but they’ve done far worse on him so maybe calling it even gives him a reason to do so.

As the three men lie on the floor, Peter reaches the top of the field and sees more people coming. Jumping over the smallest part of the fence, he lands by a road which luckily doesn’t have one car driving through it. He looks over, and sighs when the soldiers don’t stop coming. How does he escape this? Especially when they get a helicopter involved. It’s just the end of the road for him.

One last spurt of energy tells him to keep going. He turns and hits something hard, having no time to run. Squeezing his eyes shut, he doesn’t want to ever open them again. Who did he just fall into? Are they going to save him or help the others?

“Peter?” he hears, and oh god! It’s a familiar voice.

“Mr… Mr Rogers?” Peter asks, lighting up as soon as he sees the man.

He takes an offered hand, letting the man pull him to his feet. He feels safe- but that goes quickly as soon as he lets go. Apart from Tony (of course), Steve was Peter’s favourite Avenger. Kind, always there, and understanding of his anxiety, they barely spoke but every time they did he was attentive and said the right thing. Peter would be lying to say he wasn’t thrilled right now.

“Get behind me, son,” the captain says, giving Peter no time to have his inner crisis, raising his shield.

The way he fights is insane! Tossing the shield at one of the wings, the surveillance helicopter goes down and lands in the middle of the field. It explodes, knocking one third of the soldiers back (luckily, without harming any of them… which feels overly lucky on their side). The soldiers come up to Steve, and like a choreographed dance they go down one by one until the weakest run the other way.

“Peter,” Steve smiles, kneeling beside him. “You have no idea how much Tony has missed you.”

“…But he was working with Pierce, Mr Rogers. I saw it all.”

“Peter, Tony and Peirce were having an argument. Tony was seconds away from putting him in the ground for doing what he did to you. He only just found that fact out when you came into the room,” Steve explains, putting his hand on his shoulder (making Peter flinch. Steve was normally so good at remembering he didn’t like to be touched, but it’s been a week. He’d give the man the benefit of the doubt). “Do you really think he could do that to you?”

“Well, I mean- I didn’t… but it was right there in front of my eyes, and I didn’t know what to think, if I’m completely honest.”

Peter smiles to himself a little. Steve’s been there for him, right? He wouldn’t lie. Because if he had one more person tell him a lie, he was going to combust. And if Tony was disagreeing with Pierce all this time, then there was no betrayal at all, and his heart was still in the right place.

“Tony really isn’t working with them?”

“No!” Steve says, “He’d never do that, Pete. He hates that part of Shield anyway. He always has.”

“Oh, uh- well, does he want me back? I just- he might hate me now. What kind of ‘person’ runs away from a good, stable, home just because they see one conversation? He’ll think I’m stupid, and he probably hates me.”

“Woah, hold on!” Steve smiles, “It’s okay, he wants nothing more than for you to be home with us, Peter. He hasn’t stopped looking for you since you left. You could run away for three years, and he’d still welcome you back with open arms. It’s all he wants.”

Peter bites his lip nervously. Steve gets up, looking over his shoulder, “the cars over there, how about we go home?”

“Can I call him first? I don’t want this to be a surprise, Mr Rogers. He hates those.”

“Oh, yes. He does,” Steve mumbles to himself. The man fishes through his pocket to get his phone, shrugging when Peter looks expectedly at him. “Oh, great! There’s no service here. At all. We’ll have to wait until we get a bit closer.”

Peter hopes into the car, smiling over at Steve as the man gets into the drivers seat. He’s never seen this car in the compound before, so it must be Steve’s personal one. They drive for about ten minutes, stopping off at this gas station when they could’ve been home by now. Peter didn’t exactly go far… right?

“Uh, Steve? Where are we going?”

“Just getting some gas,” the soldier smiles, “Why don’t you try to call Tony again?”

Peter does just that, grabbing the phone Steve puts in his hand. He types in Tony’s phone number, a phone number he remembers from the top of his head at this point. It rings. And it rings. And just as it goes to ring again, it stops, and he hears Tony’s breathing on the other side of the line.

“Is that you? Kid? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Mr Stark, it’s me. And I’m okay. I promise.”

“Kid, where are you? I’ll come and get you now, okay? I’ll explain everything when you get here, I promise.”

“It’s okay. Mr Rogers is with me; he’s already explained what happened. And I’m so sorry for overreacting. It’s just- it hasn’t even been that long since it happened. Pierce was the worst man alive. The way he tortured me… it killed, and I was absolutely terrified that the one person I thought had my back could be working with him. But I should’ve known you never would’ve done that. It’s just not in your heart to do so.”

Tony’s quiet for a second. “…Did you say that Steve’s with you?”

“After my entire speech… that’s what you land on?” Peter huffs, “And I was being so sincere.”

“Peter, please. It’s important. Did you say that, right now, you’re with Steve Rogers?”

“Yes, Mr Stark! Why? Why is that so important?”

And then something happens that makes Peter as terrified as he was the moment the van pulled up. Because Tony doesn’t reply, but Steve Rogers himself does instead.

“I don’t think you are, Peter. Because I’m right here.”

“…What do you mean? You’re topping up on gas. I can see you!” Peter says, tugging at his seatbelt to get it un-done, but then only just realising it won’t undo. “Tony, I can’t move. I can’t do anything.”

“Alright, kid, okay. It’s going to be fine. What you need to do is activate tracking on that phone so I can follow wherever they take you. Do you know how to do that?”

Peter, all teary eyed and shaking, slides out of the phone app and into some settings that only he and Tony (and probably a lot of other people in the world) could understand. Tracking is activated and locked, before he returns to the call. Saying ‘I love you’ quickly into the phone as the other ‘Steve’ starts coming back, he hangs up and looks to the floor in shame.

‘Steve’ opens the door, prompting Peter to end the call quickly (there must be a reason for him to give him the phone. To tell him to call Tony… so, what was the big plan?) before the imposter finds out he knows what’s going on. He drops the phone on the floor, hoping fake Steve won’t realise it’s showing the Avengers their co-ordinates.

They drive for ages until Peter sees the outline of a big, grey, building shaped mostly like a warehouse. The moment Peter’s pushed in, he gets an eery vibe. Fake Steve still hasn’t admitted to lying. And it’s then that Peter sees the collar around his neck. He breaks it in half, causing the man holding him to let go. Blinking back at Peter, ‘Steve’ turns into a skrull. He looks just like the skrulls his mama was friends with. All green, they look just like the typical envisioned look of an alien (and, really, where did people get that trope from? Hardly anyone from space was actually green. Peter especially, he only went green after one of May’s ‘dinners’). The skrull (surprising Peter that they were also on Earth) thanks him a thousand times and runs. It seems he was under mind control, and maybe if he’s lucky he’s gone straight for him.

“It’s not nice to let my subjects go, Parker,” Pierce says. He’s got a big bruise over his cheek, and Peter prides in the fact that was a gift from Tony. “I guess I’ll just have to swap their work onto you. Imagine what I could do with someone like you by my side and the ability to conquer space! I’d be all powerful.”

“You’re nothing but a stain compared to the power of the galaxy. They will laugh at your pathetic try, and you will become nothing but a laughingstock,” Peter says, trying his hardest to come up with something that will deter the man from his mission. “There’s no way I will have enough power to take on anything out here by myself, never mind on planets which are simply more advanced than Earth.”

“And that’s why I have others, Peter. Those skrulls are only some of my alien collections,” Pierce grins, rubbing his hands together. “You would’ve been in the same place if I wasn’t so interested in how you got here. Most of these aliens found their way down for a visit or came in on a ship they made themselves. But you? Your mother sent you here, and I intend on coming back with you. Imagine the power in my hands.”

“You’re a maniac!” Peter says, trying to wiggle out of the bounds he’s in.

“I’m innovative, Parker. Nobody else has the strengths to find your kind, and more. I do, and that’s why I deserve the universe. I need you to find out how to get there. All I want is power, Peter, it’s not too much to ask. And if you don’t give show me how, I’ll find out myself… just like before.”

Tony

The moment he found out it was Peter calling, they tracked his phone for as far as it would go. The car is abandoned far from where any life is once the Avengers make their way down to the signal. Tony flies around the space, Thor too, as the land team try to get something out of this area. They must be close… he must be.

Tony sees the big, grey, building and notices it’s a random place to be. Flying in close, the armoured man stares down and asks Friday to tell her if there’s anyone inside. She announces there are around thirty, and that Peter is one of them. It’s more than he ever thought there would be, and it makes him shudder that Pierce can convince so many to act as they did. What reason they have, it doesn’t matter. Peter deserves to be free, and this isn’t it.

Knocking on the door of the warehouse, they wait for a while and then they knock again for good measure. Tony can’t wait until the door opens, but he’s stopped by Steve just in case ‘they got the wrong house’ (what other house would be suitable for a kidnapping? It’s obvious, he thinks, Friday literally just told him he was in there. But, according to Steve, technology goes wrong, and they can’t depend on the best AI ever made… not that he’s being biased). Tony can’t wait to hug Peter, knock Pierce out for putting him in a situation like this, and talk with Peter until forever to sort everything out between them. To let him know he can still trust him, that he can love humanity even if the minority can be so horrible.

But with the foreboding threat of Pierce trying to make himself all-powerful, they’ll have little time to enjoy their fist interaction since the kid ran away. So, with the team right behind him, Tony thinks he’s waited long enough for the door to swing open… so he hits it with a laser beam, and it all goes down.

Now to just find his kid.