I
"Get in, loser, we're going to fuck shit up.”
It's been less than 24 hours since Tony's funeral, and Peter hasn't slept in four days. He's laying on the floor of a bedroom twenty feet from Tony's lab that Pepper told him, quietly, her voice hoarse, Tony had set aside for him. Star Wars posters are lined up against the back wall, and a metal table that glows bright blue with holographic displays wraps around the two other walls. Peter's heart skipped three beats when he realized Tony put stars- despite hating space- on the ceiling.
He considers not replying, but there’s only one other person in this house that would make a Mean Girls reference, and Peter’s heard about Harley’s persistence from Tony more than enough times.
He lets his head loll to face the door but doesn't speak. Harley raises an eyebrow at him and waits. They both stare at one another for a minute until Peter hears a tiny puff of frustrated air from behind Harley.
Morgan shoves Harley's leg to the side and scurries into the room. Peter tries not to startle- he's only seen her from a distance, but now she's two feet away from him, and her eyes and smile are all Tony.
“Morgan,” Harley sighs. “I was going to ease him into it.”
The four-year-old sighs, and Peter gets a brief glimpse of Pepper.
“You said the thing from that old movie. It’s my turn!” she protests.
Peter sits up. He’s still numb but feels an odd tingle at Morgan referring to Mean Girls as an ‘old movie.’ Is this what growing old feels like?
Harley shuts the bedroom door behind them and flops to the floor, long legs out and lounging indolently. Morgan sits crisscross and sideways in between them, completing their little triangle.
“And Mr. Captain America leaves with the time stone soon,” Morgan continues imperiously.
Peter looks to Harley to see if the other boy can fill him in. He couldn’t think of why they’d need the time stone. They’d won; it was over; Mr. Stark was gone; what was the point; it wasn’t fair; what-
“Hey Peter-“ Harley snaps his fingers in his face. Peter realizes he’d hunched over as he began to spiral. Harley helps him straighten and leaves his hand on Peter’s shoulder for a moment. Peter leans into the touch, craving the comfort, his eyes still burning.
Morgan pipes up softly, “We’re gonna save Daddy, but we got to go now, Peter!”
Peter sputters. “What?”
Harley answers, “We’re gonna get the time stone and go back to 1985, and we’re going to fix everything.”
Peter's chest hurts again, and despite the quiet- it's very early- he can hear everything, and it's too loud. He thinks he's crying when he begs them to stop talking, breathless and pleading. False hope was all this route would bring them, and Peter wasn't sure he could survive that.
“It’s over,” he begs. “Just stop. We won.”
"Did we?" Harley asks eyes narrowed.
“Yes,” Peter replies shortly.
Harley hums, and Morgan opens her mouth to protest when he doesn't speak up. Harley shushes her, and she mutinously crosses her arms over her chest and pouts.
Finally, Harley asks, “You know, the people that came back, came back exactly where they were taken from?”
Peter didn’t know this. He hadn’t really considered it.
"You know how many people were in airplanes or the middle of the street or on a boat when they were snapped but died instantly when they came back?”
Peter’s heart is sinking, and he’s shocked because he didn’t know he could feel worse.
“Harley-“Peter starts, but Harley cuts him off.
“We didn’t win,” Harley stresses. “We just didn’t lose.”
He keeps hearing himself tell Tony, “we won, Mr.Stark!” The words are on repeat in his head, and the litany is making him sick. He knows they didn’t win anything.
Morgan crawls on the floor to reach Peter and tug at his sleeve. Her eyes are wide and too-familiar. “Daddy says you have to play til you win.”
Peter doesn’t correct her for saying ‘says’ instead of ‘said.’
He does, however, raise an eyebrow and ask, "And you think we can win?" He pushes to his feet roughly, but still careful of Morgan's presence, doesn't scream the way he wants to. "When even the Avengers couldn't?"
Morgan snorts, and Harley leans back on his arms with a lazy smile.
“Mommy hates the Avengers,” Morgan says.
"Your mommy wouldn't use the word 'hate,'" Peter replies, doubtful Pepper Potts had the time to think about the Avengers aside from their connection to Tony, let alone hate them.
Morgan replies, “It’s called subtext, Pete.”
Peter breaks out into laughter for what feels like the first time in years. “Aren’t you four? Do you know what subtext means?” he asks.
Morgan nods proudly. “Daddy says I’m a big four.”
Harley ruffles her hair in agreement.
"Look, Peter," Harley starts, sober again. "We're going. You can come or not, but Tony," Harley pauses and looks down. Peter wonders when the last time Harley slept was. "Tony loved you, and you should have the same chance as us to save him."
Peter chews on the inside of his cheek and looks down at his watch.
1:52 am.
It’d be five hours before anyone else was up.
“Okay, start from the beginning. What’re we doing?”
Neither Morgan nor Harley miss the 'we.'
They grin at each other and drop back to the floor to settle in. It was going to be a long night.
XXX
Harley doesn't love the way Peter whistles when he and Morgan finish relating their plan. But in their defense, their combined age was 22, and they were madly grieving their father figure. Their plan wasn't exactly pretty, but it was their only chance.
"So, we, what?" Peter asks skeptically. "Go back to 1985 and become friends with little Tony? And that's how we're going to save the Universe?"
Morgan nods her head eagerly. “Yup!”
"And you, a grown man." This was debatable. Harley was only eighteen, and he definitely didn't feel like a grown man. "Are not only okay with this plan, but willing to risk her life on it?"
“Hey,” Harley interrupts sharply. Peter flinches, and Harley sighs. He starts again, softer this time. "I wouldn't risk Morgan's life on anything," he stresses. "But if we go back, we might change things, and she won't be born."
“Can’t let that happen,” Morgan says, unnervingly unconcerned about her potential demise.
Was that an inheritable Stark trait?
“Also, Harley’ll lose his arm without you, and then who'll cook for me?" Morgan asks.
Peter twists his head to look at Harley so fast he almost gets whiplash.
“What?” he grounds out.
Harley looks sheepish but quickly recovers, "We're not sure my arm will survive the power of the time stone."
Peter wants to tell them to shut up and go back to sleep, but despite his best intentions, he wants to say, ‘let’s do it.’ Plus, he can’t let Harley just lose his arm. He’d need that to hack into MIT’s systems and register them as students.
“And your mom?” Peter asks Morgan. “You won’t miss her?”
Morgan's expression turns contemplative, and she doesn't answer immediately.
“When Harley goes back, I won’t exist,” she shrugs and answers eventually. “I’ll miss Mommy, but I’ll see her again.”
This doesn’t feel like the best reason to bring a four-year-old along on a mission that could end very badly, but Peter can admit that he wouldn’t want to risk Morgan’s existence.
“Okay,” he finally says, letting himself believe for just a nanosecond that this would work. “Okay,” he repeats and nods to himself. “Let’s do it.”
Morgan and Harley look at each other. They're shocked, to be honest. They didn't expect to make it this far.
“Er-“ Harley starts, grimacing. He slumps a little and admits, “We didn’t expect you to agree so quickly.” Harley glances at his watch. “We have another hour of material planned.”
Peter grins as his heart starts to thump faster. “Can we go now?”
Harley and Morgan share another loaded look, but Peter ignores it. He darts to his desk and grabs a backpack from under it before shoving the two shirts and one pair of jeans he has into it. At the last minute, he grabs his IronSpider armor and wallet before turning back to the others.
“So, can we?” he asks again.
Morgan shrugs and nods. “Yeah?” she answers before looking to Harley in confirmation.
Harley sighs and opens the bedroom door. They leave the room together, and Peter's not too surprised to see a small pink backpack and a larger black one leaning against the outside wall. They were ready to go with or without him.
Peter stops to help Morgan shrug her bag on, and Harley grabs his, slinging it over a shoulder.
They tiptoe quietly through the house, and Harley’s glad Peter’s room is so close to Tony’s lab. Harley picks Morgan up by the underarms to let her briefly scan her palm on the lab’s entrance lock. It hums briefly before the doors slide open quietly.
It hurts to be here in Tony's lab, even knowing (hoping) that they'd see him soon. There were traces of him everywhere: a Black Sabbath t-shirt flopped carelessly on the ground; the many empty mugs; the scraps of metal alloys shoved to one side behind a line of duct tape with "DON'T CROSS, MORGUNA" written on it in sharpie.
Peter snaps him out of his reverie when he taps lightly on the case that held the infinity stones. They were supposed to be safe down here until the remaining Avengers could take them somewhere else- spread them through the Universe so no one could use them as Thanos did again.
“What’s the code?” Peter asks.
“Try 667426,” Morgan says from her spot next to him. She’s clutching at Harley’s pants. Being in here probably made her think of Tony too.
“You don’t know the code?” Peter asks incredulously.
Harley defends himself half-heartedly. “We’re doing our best, Spidey.”
Peter freezes from where he was about to type in the code.
He asks weakly, “You know about that?”
Harley laughs. “We knew you’d survive using the stone, dude.”
Morgan chimes in, “And Daddy told me the best Spidey stories.”
Peter’s ears turn bright pink. He can only imagine the stories Tony would have told her.
He looks down to the case again and taps in ‘667426.’ The case doesn’t open. Peter looks up at them in askance.
Harley says, “Try Pepper?”
Peter shrugs and types out, ‘737737.’ The case stays firmly closed.
“Nope,” Peter replies, unnecessarily. All of them slump simultaneously- their hope-laden buzz starting to fizzle out.
Morgan pops up suddenly. “3000!” she squeals.
Peter tries '3000.' Nothing happens for a second, but then they hear a quiet whir, and the lid flips back.
“Holy shit,” Harley whispers.
Peter smacks the other boy on the shoulder, looking down at Morgan pointedly.
“She’s heard worse,” Harley defends with his hands up.
Morgan nods in agreement. She had heard worse.
"Alright, pick it up," Harley orders as he kneels to let Morgan climb into his arms. She kicks him in the kidney once, but he doesn't wince. She finally settles, clutching his neck tightly.
Peter picks the stone up. It’s small and unassuming for something that could literally change the Universe. It's not even shiny. He turns it over in his palm a few times and doesn't feel anything except a mild warmth.
"Morgan's in the middle," Harley says, shifting her in his arms. Peter moves so that his arms are around Harley and Morgan. They’re clutching at one another desperately- half-terrified this won’t work; half-terrified it will.
Peter closes the hand holding the stone and shuts his eyes. He tries to picture a calendar and imagines it saying, in bold letters, “September 1st, 1985.” His hands were shaking.
Harley was sure there hadn’t been any building on this land until the Stark’s lakehouse was built, but time travel was something they could still be nervous about.
Nothing happens, so Peter tries to concentrate harder. He pictures the calendar. He thinks of what Tony looked like at fifteen. He chants the date like a mantra.
But nothing happens. He's about to open his eyes and wave his arms in a fit of frustration when Harley's arms tighten around him. Morgan's little palm is clutching at his hair, and it almost hurts.
His palm is burning, though, and her tugging at his hair is nothing compared to his nausea as he smells his flesh burn and feels them whirling through time at the speed of light and magic.
It stops suddenly, and Peter steps back quickly from Harley and Morgan's embrace. He falls to his knees and retches. The stone is still in his bloody and burned palm. Morgan ignores his sick and gently pries his fingers open.
Harley looks around to see if they were alone. He likes what he sees. It's the same lake they'd stood by at Tony's funeral. But he has to be sure that they've made it before he can relax. He shrugs his backpack off and digs around, pulling out the satellite watch he'd rigged. It would tell him what time it was based on the closest satellite, and that was the most accurate date they'd be able to get until they hiked the three miles to the nearest diner in the area.
He checks it and immediately drops to his knees, narrowly avoiding Peter’s vomit.
“We made it,” he says. He wants to cheer, but their work had only just begun.