If This Were A Movie This Chapter Would be a Music Montage
“Let’s get this show on the road, then!” Tony called, clapping a few more times.
“Alright, alright, hold your horses,” Danny grumbled. “We’re not just gonna dive right into some sort of chaos fueled free for all, here.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together, grinning. “Instead, I’m going to treat you like wayward middle school students!”
“What’s that mean?” Clint asked.
Danny grinned wider. “Why, small groups, of course!”
Peter hadn’t been expecting that, but he couldn’t say he was all that surprised, either. It seemed just exactly like the kind of thing Danny would do. Danny and his group split into three teams of two. Danny was with Winter, Sebastian was with Tucker, and Sam was with Jazz. There were ten superheroes altogether, so they ended up with two groups of three and one group of four.
Danny hadn’t let them choose their groups. They had all done what kids in middle school did and sort of clumped into their own groups, but then Danny came along and sorted them out into actual groups. Peter ended up with Natasha and Clint, which he was fine with because he was close with Natasha and while he didn’t know Clint all that well, he was always fun and easy to be around. Tony ended up in the group of four, with Rhodey, Steve, and Wanda. The last group was Bruce, Sam, and Vision. Peter didn’t really get the logic.
“Nat, do you see some sort of system here?” he whispered.
Natasha looked around the room, then at their own little group. “If I was splitting us up into combat teams, I’d do something like this,” she mused. “He’s split us up so there’s at least one person that’s usually in the air and one that’s usually on the ground. I don’t quite understand the choice of our team, though, since you swing and don’t fly.”
“It’s categorical by the way we fight, I’m pretty sure,” Clint chimed in. “Tony’s group charges into situations and doesn’t think about strategy until they’re in the thick of things, Bruce’s group are the smart ones with the most common sense, and we’re the agile ones that plan a bit beforehand but still think on our feet.”
“Oh,” Peter murmured back, looking at the groups in a new light. “That makes sense.”
“It does,” Natasha agreed.
“Now,” Danny said from the front of the room. “Some of you have probably already figured out the logic behind these groups. For those of you that haven’t, it’s based mostly on the way you fight and what I can tell of the way you think.”
“Told you,” Clint whispered. Natasha shushed him.
“This team over here,” Danny continued, pointing at Tony’s team, “will start with Jazz and Sam. Your designation is Team Icarus.”
The group obligingly let Jazz and Sam lead them across the gym.
“This team,” he pointed to Bruce’s team, “you’ll start with Sebastian and Tucker. Your designation is Team Daedalus.”
Another shuffle, until Danny and Winter were alone in the middle of the gym with Peter, Natasha, and Clint. Danny turned back to them, a smile still in place.
“And you’re with us, obviously. Your designation is Team Mercury.”
Peter wasn’t sure what to expect. When they started with “emotional control and psychic defenses”, he was a little taken aback. He could tell Natasha was too, even if she didn’t seem it.
“No,” Danny said, for what felt like the millionth time. “You can’t just pretend outwardly that you don’t have emotions, Miss Romanoff. You can surely fool humans that easy easily enough, but ghosts aren’t human. They’re empathic.”
Natasha glared at him, but Danny didn’t back down. He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair.
“I don’t expect you to be able to build a perfect physic barrier right now or anything. But you need to understand the concept, at least, and not just keep trying to do the same thing you’ve always done. You don’t always fight ghosts. This is new territory. You have to adapt accordingly.”
They kept working. Peter was, apparently, decent at this. Clint got the same assessment. After a while Natasha got close enough that Danny let it go for now. Then Danny switched gears, and he and Winter started going over ghost types and different fighting techniques. At some point, they started asking them about a million questions about their fighting styles, and they wrote it all down.
“Assessment sheets,” Danny had explained, tapping the clipboard. “When we switch groups we’ll have you take them and give them to the next people you’re working with. That way they know what you already know and what you need to know, and so you only have to get interrogated once.”
“Why paper? Wouldn’t something tech be easier?” Peter had asked.
“I’m documenting your strengths and weaknesses here. It’s better to be able to burn it. Plus, tech doesn’t always work quite right in our house,” Danny explained, not looking up from his clipboard.
“Oh.”
Eventually, Danny and Winter were finished with them. Apparently it was timed, because everyone else got done at the same time. Danny gave them their assessment sheets to take with them and sent them off to Jazz and Sam. Jazz and Sam were a very different experience. They read through the assessment sheets, asked occasionally for clarification, and scrawled notes. Then they started drilling them, having them do the same kinds of exercises and drills that Steve had them do. Sam started modifying them then, giving advice and succinct notes on how to adapt the way they normally fought to ghost fighting. Jazz would correct them, then she’d show them new moves, then drill them again.
By the time they switched over to Sebastian and Tucker, Peter was exhausted and covered in sweat under his suit. Natasha and Clint were breathing heavily and slicked in sweat as well. Tucker and Sebastian took one look at them and sent them off to get a drink and change if they wanted to. Peter didn’t exactly have a spare spider suit to change into, but he drank some water with Natasha and turned on the AC in the suit. The material was stretchy and thin so it dried out quickly enough.
They returned to Sebastian and Tucker, who were all about the tech. They had some weapons with them that they had them each try, then they looked over the notes from the others and started offering new things. They asked about a million questions about what kind of tech each of them used, and started scrawling designs. That was what caught Peter’s interest. He leaned over the blueprints Sebastian started designing with a careful, precise hand.
“What’s that power source?” he asked, pointing at where the power seemed to be woven throughout the Widow’s Bites they were working on.
Tucker looked up at him and a grin slowly spread across his face. “You’re a nerd under the mask, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Peter admitted, without preamble.
“Energized ectoplasm. It doubles as the power source and the reason it works as a ghost weapon. I can walk you through it, if you want,” Tucker offered.
“Please.”
And so he did, and the pieces of why Tony couldn’t figure out ghost tech clicked themselves together in Peter’s head. They kept going until Daanny called out and everyone regathered in the middle of the room. There were a few more general lecture type things that they hadn’t gotten to last time, so Danny went over those, then they were finished. And Tony offered everyone pizza, because he’s Tony, so of course he did.
Danny opened his mouth to say something, but Sebastian pulled an arm around his shoulders.
“We’ll stay,” Jazz declared, exchanging a look with Sebastian and Winter. “That would be great, thank you so much.”
“Glad to be of service,” Tony said.
They all went back up to the penthouse. Tony didn’t actually call and order pizza, he just had Friday do it. Peter ended up on a couch with Natasha on one side and Tony on the other, each with an arm around him.
“So Thor’s back on Earth,” Danny announced, casually, from where he was sitting on the floor with his back against Sebastian’s legs.
There were various exclamations of shock from the Avengers.
“Ellie and Spidey dragged him back from Asgard by his ankle. Phantom won’t stop complaining about how he had to sort it out,” Danny explained. “He sent him off to Jane Foster and he seemed happy enough, but well, Ellie has a tendency to drag people into crazy things and they don’t always end well. So if he shows up here, just, y’know, that’s what happened.”
Danny hadn’t really been expecting the Avengers to have such a reaction to that. I mean, sure, Thor was an Asgardian God...okay, maybe Danny was just desensitized to this kind of thing. He was half dead, obviously. Well. Maybe it wasn’t obvious but like….it was still true. He hadn’t wanted to stay for dinner. His siblings knew he hated staying for dinner. Which is exactly why they were staying for dinner, he was certain.
“...did you send the ghost dog after him?” Tony asked, turning to face Spidey.
“...maybe?” Spidey answered, managing to sound innocent.
Natasha turned to him and started speaking in rapid fire Russian, scolding him. Danny knew that’s what it was, because he understood every word she said. The gist of it was that Spidey was an idiot and needed to stop taking candy from strangers, or some Russian proverb like that. It didn’t translate very well. So Danny repeated the proverb in Russian, raising an eyebrow.
Everyone stared at him, and he realized that they probably didn’t expect him to know Russian. He was too sleep deprived to think about that before he spoke but, well.
“Danny knows, like, a million languages. Don’t think about it too much,” Tucker spoke up, reaching over to pat Danny on the shoulder.
“Right. Well, okay, then,” Tony agreed.