i’m just a kid
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 4:55 AM
FRIDAY is fucked.
Tony, for all of his engineering expertise, can’t understand what could have made her shut down like this. FRIDAY is his, after all; how could something so easily break her? He installed that alarm system to let him know whenever someone tried to hack her, but no one had ever been successful. It would take state-of-the-art computer gear, intelligence that rivaled his, incredible perseverance, years of hacking experience, and overwhelming knowledge of computers, coding, electrical engineering, and artificial intelligences. Who could have done this? FRIDAY is pliant now, easily moldable to whoever (probably a teenage hacker or some rival company) wants to use her.
He takes another gulp of coffee and rubs his forehead. He’s been working for about an hour now, and he’s got nothing. He spins to face a glowing blue screen that’s supposed to display FRIDAY’s error messages; it’s empty. FRIDAY’s silence is unnerving, but not dangerous... yet. Honestly, he’s impressed by whoever managed to hack her; it takes a lot. He might have to hire them when he’s done tracking them down and giving them an Iron Man bitchslap.
He smirks to himself as he types more, checking FRIDAY’s basic output before the incident. Everything looks normal.
4-7-18 2:56 - TURN ON MAIN LIGHT - BEDROOM - DIM
4-7-18 3:01 - UNLOCK FRONT DOOR - HOUSE
4-7-18 3:02 - TURN ON PATH LIGHTS - HOUSE TO LAB - DIM
4-7-18 3:10 - UNLOCK FRONT DOOR - LAB
4-7-18 3:26 - CALL “rhodeybear”
4-7-18 3:43 - ALERT 13C - DIGITAL INTRUDER
4-7-18 3:46 - MAIN SYSTEMS COMPROMISED - INITIATE PROTO—
From that point forward, FRIDAY’s output is eerily absent. As Tony Stark’s AI, she was built to respond to any situation; if she had more time, she might’ve switched all security to manual controls and re-encrypted all of her systems so that Tony could at least provide safety for the compound, but she didn’t have the time before something halted her actions completely.
He still has access to all of his Stark Industries and personal files, as well as all of her engineering capabilities; through various tests, he recognizes that FRIDAY has lost all of her autonomy, but her basic foundations of code, secure information, and technological ability still stand.
Tony sets basic parameters to keep all of the physical security systems intact, and then he gets to work. He has to find out who attacked FRIDAY.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 7:03 AM
The kids are asleep when Julia leaves for work that morning, but Cristian’s awake making them breakfast. “Up already, Julia?” he asks.
“Yeah.” She pours herself a cup of coffee, takes a sip. “I’m opening up Charlie’s investigation today. Keep an eye on the kids, okay?”
He’s behind her now, and he puts his hand on her arm. They share a quick, sweet kiss. “Of course I will. Be safe.”
There’s a lingering tone of worry behind his words—he’s worried about what will happen when she finds Charlie. “Don’t worry.” Julia kisses him again. “He’s my brother, Cristian. He would never hurt me.”
Julia walks into the police station an hour earlier than usual—she needs time to formulate her case for the missing drug addicts. By the time she’s had her morning coffee and settled down at one of the main computers to draft her proposal, her boss, Lieutenant Huang, tracks her down. “You’re here early, Sergeant,” he says, shoving his hands into his pockets. “What’s wrong?”
The worry in her mind grows, folding over itself. “Nothing, Lieutenant,” she lies. “Just thought I’d finish up some work from yesterday.”
Huang gives her a hard stare. “Don’t lie to me, Paz. You’re about as good at that as you are at getting here early.”
Julia checks herself, quickly; she straightens her back, adjusts her uniform, and clasps her hands behind her back. “Sir,” she announces, “I’d like permission to start a case concerning the recent strain of missing drug addicts here in Queens.”
Huang visibly stiffens at her request, but she can’t tell what’s running through his mind—disbelief, anger, frustration? Something flashes across his face (annoyance, perhaps), and he frowns at her. “And how did you come across this idea, Sergeant?”
Julia clears her throat once (it’s always been a nervous tic of hers) and then explains, saying that she got an anonymous tip about the subject from a rehabilitated drug addict; Julia conveniently forgets to mention that Ty, her tip, fell back into drugs only a few weeks after rehab. “He was terrified when I spoke to him, Lieutenant.” Her voice is stern, as though she’s talking to one of her children instead of her boss. She tries to drain the harshness out of her voice, but it’s so difficult when she’s talking about her family, her brother. “Many of his colleagues have gone missing in the past weeks, the most recent being two days ago, sir.”
“And none of these were reported,” he adds, the assumption clear on his face, “because those who would report them missing fear legal repercussions.”
“Exactly, sir.”
As Lieutenant Huang drops into silence, she watches his expression carefully. She knows the thoughts that must be flitting through his mind: that drug addicts go missing all the time, that they probably suffered from a group overdose, that drugs were unpredictable, that she had nothing to worry about… But when he looks at her again, she only finds mild exhaustion in his eyes. “I’ll let you pursue this addict case,” he says finally, “as long as you keep up with your other work—”
Relieved gratitude floods her body. “Oh, thank you, sir, I—”
“—and take on a new child abduction case.”
Her brain stutters to a hesitant halt; she clears her throat again, anxiety sliding down the back of her neck. “Child abduction…”
“I know you’re not a fan, but I’m really understaffed right now, Paz, what with that break-in recently—”
“Not a fan ?” Julia repeated. She’d never once taken a child abduction case, and everyone at the station knew it. As a mother of two young children, she could hardly look at a child abduction case without thinking about Leila or Jaime in the same position. She adamantly refused child abduction and exploitation cases, mostly because they became so persona, even if she never did field work for the case. “No. No. Absolutely not. Huang, you know I don’t take those kinds of cases; put me on something else.”
Huang holds out a glowing tablet to her, his grip light. “Take this case, or lose your addict one. It’s your choice.”
Julia’s mouth goes dry; she presses her lips together, releasing her hands from their irontight grip behind her back. She only has one thought: I have to save my brother. Fear, courage, skill… It doesn’t matter. She has to find Charlie. “Fine,” she grunts, snatching the tablet from him to read the first line: Case 854-13V - Child Abduction: Cassandra Marie Paxton-Lang, Age Seven.
This is going to be a long couple of weeks, Julia knows. But at least now she has a true way to find her missing brother. Now, at least, she can breathe easy.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 7:49 AM
Hope arrives at the hospital the following morning, nearly frantic with worry. Maggie relayed the past twenty-four hours to her in voicemails, but she didn’t get any of her calls until that morning. “I was asleep,” she explains. “I leave my phone off, I’m so sorry…” How odd. Hope feels gentler now, less fire-and-brimstone, softened by the blow of Cassie’s kidnapping in strange contrast to her usual hard self. The shield Hope constructs around herself constantly is gone. “And Cassie…”
“Where’s Scott?” Maggie snaps, startling Hope out of her dazed, depressive state. “Is he coming?”
Already vulnerable, Hope’s guilt spills across her face like red paint on a white wall, flooding her skin. “I… I didn’t know… I…”
“What?” Hope (she curses herself for her weakness) is frustratingly inept right now, wringing her hands. “What happened? Where is he?”
Hope glances at Jim, helpless. “I’m sorry.”
Jim shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Hope, please,” he says calmly. “Tell us what you know.”
Hope’s frantic hand movements slow, and finally she confesses. “I haven’t seen Scott in three days,” she begins, her voice weakened by guilt. “We had this big fight, and, um—shit, sorry-” She rubs at her watery eyes, trying her best not to break down in front of the couple. “He… He left to go stay with Luis, just for a few days, and he stop—stopped answering my phone calls, but I thought he—that he was just ignoring me, but when y- you called, I-I, sorry, I—” Hope is fully crying now, tears taking turns treading down both cheeks, her face thrumming with anguish, but strangely, she’s pretending that she isn’t, turning and brushing away each tear with a messy swipe of her hand. “I went to go—to go check on him, ‘cause he wouldn’t answer even when I mentioned Ca-Cassie, and I called Luis whe-when he wouldn’t open the door, and” —Hope clenches her hands into tight fists— “he told me he-he hadn’t been at his apartment in a while, that he was out staying with some family, and so I broke in, and it was—” She gulps. “I-it was a wreck, there was blood on the kitchen table, and Scott was-he was gone. Someone took him.”
Maggie slumps back in her hospital bed; Hope winces, letting the blow of her words echo in the sterilized air.
“I already—I told the police,” Hope continues, quieter. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 10:20 AM
It’s too quiet in his cell; Scott’s never done well with silence. He’s the kind of person who will cram his brain with loud music whenever he’s alone, stammer about the newest Game of Thrones episode whenever there’s an awkward gap in conversation. It’s part of why being under house arrest was so difficult for him. His mind starts to make up noises to fill the silence: faint screams, violent hisses, and frantic whispers. At first, he thinks he’s going crazy, but soon he realizes that most of the sounds are coming from the mostly unconscious teenager in the chair only a few feet away from him.
Guilt pangs in Scott’s chest, bouncing off of his ribs. The kid’s moving his head now, mumbling incoherently; a string of saliva slides down his chin, and all of a sudden, his eyes go comically wide before he blinks lethargically, lids closing over bloodshot eyes. His face goes through several expressions—confusion, irritation, panic, pain, determination, anger, frustration, back to panic—before falling slack again, succumbing to whatever drug sloshes through his veins.
Scott gulps down his guilt; it’s his fault this kid is in this mess in the first place, but he had no choice. They would have tortured Cassie again, and he can’t… Memories claw at the surface of his brain, of screams that set his blood on fire and pain that rocks his entire body.
He can’t do that again.
Mason sits in the corner, nodding off, a McDonald’s burger in one hand and his hammer in the other. Whenever his head dips too low, heavy with sleep, he jerks awake again, glares cautiously at Scott, and takes another bite of his burger.
It’s confusing how human Mason is. Scott would have expected a blockbuster villain with a hockey mask and a pair of red eyes to be his torturer, not this six-foot-one man with a hooked nose who eats McDonald’s, chews his nails ragged, and flinches wildly whenever Charlie enters the room. He’s a brute, for sure, but he’s not sadistic or psychopathic. He’s just scared. Strangely enough, Scott sees familiar terror reflected in his enemy’s eyes; Mason’s just as chillingly afraid of Charlie as Scott is.
So when Charlie shoves the door open and gargles an order at Mason, Scott doesn’t miss the way the smaller man scrambles to his feet with trembling knees. “Charlie—he’s been working hard this whole time, I swear, I made sure he was going fast as he—”
“Fine,” he snaps back, shoving the man aside. His voice is tighter now, agitated, thrumming with dark determination. “Lang?”
As Charlie’s eyes settle on him, near-hysterical alarm nails between his ribs. “I—well, um, after shutting his AI down, I got a—um, connection, to all the electronic devices in—um, in Stark’s lab, but I can’t get—um, override the computer screens without disabling all, um, all the computer’s functions—but I can override the TV, but it won’t have audio…”
Charlie gives him a sour look.
“...b-but with the equipment, um, that we have, we could just use the audio from the phone,” Scott finishes. “We could hook up the microphone? Th-then we could, uh, he could hear everything in the room?”
“How long?”
Scott scrapes his mind for a number, anything he can give to Charlie to tame the beast for a few seconds. He’s really high now, his pupils gaping with whatever drug he’s on, so every movement he makes is on the offense. “An hour, maybe less.”
“Fine. An hour, or your kid—”
“No, no, no—an hour, that’s all I need, I swear.”
Charlie scowls, turns on his heel, and leaves the room.
Scott’s chest tightens.
He gets to work.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 11:11 AM
Tony is an hour into a deep hack of FRIDAY’s software when everything goes black. “What the hell ?” He backtracks for something he could have done to interfere with the electrical wiring of the lab, but he wasn’t anywhere near that part of FRIDAY’s systems. What the fuck just happened?
His computers are dizzyingly quiet. No lights, no tech… Even the quiet hum of air conditioning is gone. DUM-E and U are both eerily still, not even a beep or a whir to reassure Tony that they’re still awake. Tony’s never experienced silence quite this loud; the absence of his machines, the beating heart of his lab, is surreal. He spams the on-off button on every piece of tech in the room: his computers, his television, the coffee machine… He taps the screen of his StarkPhone, confused at its obstinate inactivity. Nothing but darkness, silence, and Tony slamming his fingers against unresponsive keys until—
—the grating purr of static from the television in the corner of the room, buzzing incessantly; as the only noise in the entire lab, it’s impossible to miss, so as soon as it turns on, Tony scrambles over to it, searching for an explanation to the sudden shutdown in the most technologically advanced hub in New York, probably in the United States.
Before Tony’s eyes, the tangled black and white dots blink (once, twice) before the screen whites out completely and the audio cuts out. “The hell…” Tony mutters, trying to adjust the channel setting on the TV. The lights begin to flicker on, blinking erratically for a minute before returning to normal, followed by the air conditioning, the computer systems, and the rest of the electricity. A surge of euphoria rushes through him. “Thank God!” FRIDAY isn’t back yet, still dead to Tony’s commands, but at least he has his tech back.
The phone’s loud beeping interrupts his thoughts, but Tony ignores it and goes back to work. He doesn’t really care who’s calling him—he’s tending to FRIDAY right now, and no one actually calls his lab except for Happy, occasionally, and other workers in Stark Industries. They can wait. Everyone in his family (Pepper, Peter, Rhodey, Happy, etc) know to call him on his cell phone for any real emergencies.
As Tony forages through his computer’s history to discover what caused the blackout glitch, the phone beside him chimes again, bleating maddeningly. “FRIDAY, mute—” He stops. Fuck, right, FRIDAY’s gone radio-silent. He groans and rubs his fingers against his aching temples. How the hell did this happen?
Fed up, he picks up the phone at last. It’s probably just Happy, calling to check on him. “Tony’s Pizza,” he grumbles. “May I take your fucking order?”
A male voice on the other end. “Stark.”
“Yeah, I know” —Tony types furiously into his computer— “the blackout wasn’t ideal, and FRIDAY’s having a little trouble, but we’re doing our best, she just needs some time to—”
“Stark.” Again, this time louder.
Tony’s barely listening. “—rest; I found something that could lead us to whatever knocked her out—”
“Stark.”
“What?” Tony snaps. It suddenly dawns on him that the man on the other line calls him Stark. Not Tony, not Tones, not Mr. Stark, not sir. Not even boss, like FRIDAY would. “Who the hell is this?”
A snort, halfway between a laugh and a sneeze. “I’m Charlie,” he announces. “And before you ask, no, I don’t work for you.”
Dread coils in Tony’s gut. Everything is off : the man’s voice is too slippery, his words too careful. “Then get off the line, moron. I don’t know how you got access to this number, but it’s not—”
“I called you a week ago, motherfucker.” A turgid chuckle. “Don’t you remember me?”
It all dawns on Tony at once. He does recognize this guy’s voice, from a strange call he got late one night while working in his lab.
Tony doesn’t usually listen to the extravagant rants of his late-night fans, especially ones that sound stoned up to their necks, but only two seconds after introducing himself over the phone, he says something that made Tony freeze. “Do you know anything about the organization called HYDRA?”
Tony pauses, his thumb inches away from the END CALL button. His thoughts skid to a blurry halt. HYDRA. “What?”
“HYDRA,” repeats the man on the other end. Tony can’t remember what his name is; he’s too busy reeling in shock. How does this stoned Tony Stark fan know anything about the über-secret paramilitary terrorist group that has been wreaking havoc on the Avengers’ lives for years? “I mean, shit, you’re Iron Man. I think you know what I’m sayin’, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Tony responds. He’s pacing now, wearing holes into the floor of his lab. “Let’s say I know about HYDRA. What’s it to you?”
Tony can almost hear the smile in the man’s voice. “HYDRA was a cult,” he explains, “but they were fucking brilliant, too. They used some kind of energy source—like yours, your arc tech, right? Called it the Tesseract. Back in their prime years, they had these weapons…” A contented sigh. “Fuck, they were incredible, Stark. Could fucking disintegrate a person from inside out; hit them anywhere, and they’d be gone. Poof. Not even ashes to bury.”
Tony’s concerned confusion warps into something deeper. He’s careful with his next words. “Yeah, okay. Pretty dangerous stuff. I think I can speak for the rest of humanity when I say that I’m glad they were destroyed when the star-spangled man in tights took them down in—”
“That kind of power is… is… unheard of. Forget bullets. Forget firearms. Those weapons would trump any gun today, Stark. The person who had that kind of weapon would rule the fucking world.”
“Yeah, if you’re Hitler,” Tony snaps. “Look, man, here in America, we don’t put people in power just because they have the most firepower; you can’t—”
“Will you help me?”
Tony stops pacing. DUM-E whirs in confusion at his sudden halt in movement. “What?”
The man continues, undeterred by the tones of astonishment in Tony’s voice. “Stark tech, I mean, it’s the best.” His words are starting to slur, stringing together. “Arc reactor tech is so close to the energy source that HYDRA used. I know all about it. About you. If you made that weapon, the one they had back then, you could control the world. You’d only have to fire it once, really, for the whole world to know how fucking powerful you are. Just imagine, Stark. The world at your fingertips.”
“That’s called terrorism, bud,” Tony intruded. “You know, you should probably see someone about that. Fear tactics? Not good. Hope you’re not into politics. The general population doesn’t take well to violence as a campaign strategy—”
“Don’t play dumb!” snaps the other man, fury rattling the phone. “I know you understand me! We could bring peace to the whole fucking planet!”
Tony doesn’t usually have people scream at him over the phone—that’s a job reserved solely for Pepper, if anyone at all, so listening to this man screech about HYDRA to him on a Thursday night is such a foreign concept. “Okay, don’t get your panties in a bunch—”
“You remember what your father used to say, don’t you?”
At the words ‘your father,’ something in Tony’s brain flips on, an old, rusty light; he goes quiet, rendered speechless.
“‘Peace,” echoes the man, “means having a bigger stick than the other guy.’”
Those are Howard Stark’s words, alright. Those are the words that Tony used to justify every weapons deal he ever made. Years of violence and not caring who bled in his wake, all backed by those fucking words. “No,” Tony says quietly, “it doesn’t.”
“Aw, don’t tell me you’re one of those fucking hippies, sticking flowers in guns or whatever the fuck they do—you’re Iron Man! You build weapons for a living!”
“ Built,” corrects Tony, with an icy tone to his voice. “Now, I build shields.”
“So you won’t help me?” Now, his voice is desperate, hung on Tony’s next words.
“No!” Tony frowns. “Like I said, your violence slash world domination tactic? Not really my style. That means get lost, creep.”
He hangs up before the guy on the other line can say anything else.
“...you’re that psycho?” Tony says, waiting for the grating voice on the other end to confirm his assumption.
“I’m not crazy!” he snarls back, outraged. “My idea is brilliant. Just because you can’t see it…” An irritated sigh. “It doesn’t matter. Because now you’re going to help me.”
“ Help you?” Tony laughs. “Buddy, I’m about half a second away from calling the authorities on your ass.”
A chuckle reverberates from the other end of the phone; that’s not the response Tony was expecting. “I wouldn’t if I were you, Stark. Turn around.”
It’s then that Tony realizes he can no longer see the eerie glow of a white screen on the wall in front of him. Every hair on his body stands on end; he spins around quickly, launching the Iron Man gauntlet attached to his wristwatch, but instead of an attacker, he finds—
—the television screen behind him: a silent, high-definition image of a small gray room, mostly empty. In the center is a chair with its back to him, where a dark-haired person sits, their entire body obscured by the chair.
Tony hates the way his skin crawls; it’s like all his nerve endings are on fire. Who the hell is in that chair? The camera moves with a jerk, transferred by someone’s shaky grip around the whole chair until it settles in front of it—
All the blood drains out of Tony’s face.
Peter.
Seeing him is like blade punched deep in his gut—it’s not possible, it’s not fucking possible— but there he is, Tony’s invincible Spider-Kid, chained to a fucking chair in some kind of fucking torture room. Other than the bruise swelling on the side of his face and the blood staining his knuckles, Peter seems fine, but he’s in danger. Tony’s grip clenches like iron around the phone. Peter’s still wearing the clothes he wore when he left Tony’s lab last night. How… How is this even possible? Peter went home, he thinks. Aunt May was supposed to take him to get Thai food at this nice new restaurant. Peter wouldn’t shut up about it the whole afternoon. There’s no way… He can’t even think—
That slimy asshole on the other end of the phone is still talking. “...refused to help,” he’s saying, pride twisting into his words, “so I had to take some extreme measures.”
Rage flares in Tony’s chest, pulsing with each quickening heartbeat. “He’s not—”
“And before you go claiming you don’t know him,” continues Charlie, “I’ll just give a quick recap of what we found in your files on him.” Ever-darkening horror sinks into him, puncturing his skin. He only holds Peter’s files on his most secure server—FRIDAY’s server. This psychotic stoner couldn’t have— “Peter Benjamin Parker, sixteen-year-old kid at Midtown High, from Queens, does decathlon and… what’s that? Loves mint chocolate chip ice cream? You really are thorough with this shit.” He chuckles. “How am I doing so far, Tony ?”
“Fuck you—”
“His parents—deceased. Moved in with his lovely aunt, May Parker and his uncle, but he died, too. Jesus, this kid’s got worse luck than me! And here we have an entire list of documented injuries—we’ll save that for later—ooh, finally, the belle of the ball” —fear rattles Tony’s rib cage— “you tell everyone he’s your intern, but he’s Spider-Man, isn’t that right?”
Every alert in Tony’s brain screeches wildly. He knows. He starts to protest, but Charlie cuts him off.
“Deny it,” he growls, “and your precious Peter Parker will pay, you understand me? I know your kind; you rich fucks think you can just shit all over us, but not this time. I’ve got him, and I know what he means to you. He comes over to your place all the time, doesn’t he? I’m surprised you haven’t gotten out any adoption papers.”
Fury he never thought he had unfurls inside of his chest, bursting through his mouth. “Fuck you,” Tony snarls, “that’s my—”
That’s when Charlie whips around and slaps Peter across the face so hard that his head whips to the side; Tony recognizes with a painful jolt how fucking unresponsive he is. A hit like that… It’s not something you can sleep through. His eyes are half-open, drugged slits that barely widen at the blow; his head rolls on his neck, slack, and sweat pours over his skin. The camera is horrifically high-tech, Peter’s suffering defined so well that it almost feels like he’s watching a new episode of How To Get Away With Murder instead of a livestream of the kid’s torture. The only sign of true consciousness comes from Peter’s fingers, which twitch as if in protest, strangled by pain. It’s such a blatant contradiction of the hyperactive, fast-talking, high-spirited kid he knows so well, and it chills him to the bone.
“The great Tony Stark,” snickers another voice through the phone, and as Tony’s senses return to him, he realizes he can hear faint groans on the other end of the line. “Speechless.”
That’s Peter, moaning in pain, barely clinging to consciousness. That’s Peter, the wonderful sixteen-year-old who helps little old ladies carry their groceries, even when he’s not Spider-Man. That’s Peter, who can barely make it through a sentence without making a Star Wars reference. “What the hell did you do to him?” Tony snaps.
“He’s some freak, that kid,” declares Charlie. “It took like six fucking doses of sedatives just to get him on the ground, and we still had to knock him out after, and that stuff’s supposed to knock the fucking Winter Soldier on his ass—”
And that’s why Peter looks like he’s overdosed on sleeping pills. “He’s just a kid!” growls Tony, protective rage flurrying through his brain. My kid, he forgets to say. He’s my kid.
“A kid?” interrupts another, a twitchy, scruffy man with his arm in a black sling. “That kid nearly took my fucking arm off!”
“He’s sixteen —”
On screen, the man named Charlie responds, poking a metal object into Peter’s bruised cheek. “I don’t fucking care how old he is! I don’t care if he’s in fucking kindergarten! That—that freak took down five of my best guys with a broken arm and a truckload of the Winter Soldier’s sedatives in him.”
Blood trickles down Peter’s cheek, and Tony watches Peter stir, his limbs twisting weakly against the cuffs. “Jesus—just don’t hurt him, please… Listen, I don’t know what you want, but you can have it, okay? Just leave him alone.” Under different circumstances, Tony and Peter would be able to fight their way out of this one, one clad in red-and-gold, the other in red-and-blue, but not right now. His first priority is to get Peter thehell out of there. “I’m the one you want, right? To make your world-peace gun? Let him go, and take me.” His breath is caught in his lungs, sticking like peanut butter inside of him as he awaits Charlie’s answer. “Take me,” he repeats.
Charlie laughs a little bit—a wet, violent sound—and Tony’s hope fizzles out. “Don’t I wish, Stark. But unfortunately, you’ve got as much security as the fucking president, and people tend to notice when the most famous billionaire in the US goes missing. Even your little miss Potts is untouchable. Your place is a fucking fortress.” He shrugs. “So we took the next best thing. Your Spider-Kid. That’s what you call him, right?”
Reality screeches in Tony’s ears—no, no, no! He only calls him that when they’re in private, how… Sickening understanding—FRIDAY’s unusual shutdown, the exposure of his files… That was no coincidence. That was him. This… This is all Charlie.
“Your precious little freak,” Charlie continues, ignorant to Tony’s realization. He shoves the point of the object (a knife, Tony sees with an electrifying wave of fear) through the flesh of Peter’s cheek—a garbled moan of pain clashes with Tony’s stammered “n-no!”
Charlie smiles at the camera, one fist in Peter’s hair, pulling Peter’s head back against the headrest, the other pushing the knife deeper. “This is your life now, Stark,” he declares, his forehead shining with sweat and pride. “You’re gonna make my fucking weapon, and I’m gonna take this freak apart piece by piece. Every day until you finish.”
Then he slides out the knife, eliciting another groan of protest from semi-conscious Peter, and flips it down, stabbing it directly into the kid’s broken left forearm with a horrific crunch as metal meets bone.
Peter’s scream makes every bone on Tony’s body light on fire—he can’t breathe, he can’t think, his knees wobble—Charlie’s twisting the knife—anger bursts into panic, bubbling over in his aching chest— “Stop, stop it! I’ll do it— I’ll do it, I’ll make your fucking weapon!”
A victorious grin. Charlie’s hand stops, pulling the knife out, and a woman beside him presses a bandage to the bleeding wound as Peter whimpers. “I thought you might.”
Tony wants to rip his face apart with his bare hands; helpless, he watches his hijacked television screen as Peter chokes on the pain of his new wound.
Instead, he thinks of how he can get Peter home safely—his mind flits through all of his technological expertise, hacks, anything. He has to get Peter out of that hellhole— now.
Charlie’s talking more, rambling about some “rules” he made up for Tony. “...and remember, we’re watching you, Stark. We got access to all your pretty little computers, all your cameras, all your robots, all your fancy tech. We can see all of it. Break one of my rules, and your kid pays the price.” He lets go of Peter’s hair, letting his chin drop to his chest, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper from the pocket of his jeans and squinting at it. “One, don’t leave your lab. We’ll supply you with any science shit you need, and food and shit. Two, don’t talk to anybody—text, email, call, whatever. No fucking cops. If someone gets suspicious, you tell us, but don’t talk to them. I don’t need you spillin’ your guts about the whole operation, got it? Don’t try to get out of this, I fucking swear. A word of this gets out and your precious kid loses his hands, got it? Three, treat me with some fucking respect.” He crouches by Peter’s bloody hand and yanks the knife out. “Four, work as fast as you can. Five, don’t try to find us. If you do, you’ll pay, you’ll fucking pay, I swear. Six, don’t be fucking suspicious. Someone comes to ask what you’re doing, tell ‘em to go fuck themselves. Say you’re working on the next best thing. Say anything you want—just don’t be fucking suspicious.” His teeth glint on the screen. “And seven—any time you break my rules” —he waves the bloody knife at the camera— “I break Parker. Understand, Stark?”
Tony gulps, swallowing the lump of terror in his throat. It takes everything in him not to scream at this psycho, but he’s got Peter. He’d only be making it worse. “Understood,” he grunts through gritted teeth.
Then the line clicks off, and Tony’s left in unnatural silence. I am Iron Man, he thinks, and then he says it out loud. “I am Iron Man,” he repeats. Better yet, he is Tony Stark. Genius. Inventor. Hacker. Scientist. Charlie and his gang of misfit toys have no idea what they’re getting themselves into.
No one messes with Tony Stark.
No one messes with Tony Stark’s kid.
Without a moment to waste, Tony Stark gets to work.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 11:48 AM
As soon as Charlie finally hung up on Tony Stark, the other people in the room—Charlie’s wife, Renee, and Mason, follow their leader out of the room, and then it hits barely twenty seconds later—virulent tracking software coming from Tony Stark’s computer, hidden beneath layers of weapons research files, software actively seeking their current location.
On the computer screen before him, Tony’s infectious software spreads, attacking the careful code Scott had written only hours prior; panic surges in his chest, thumping frantically. If he leaves Tony to his own devices, allowing him to hack into the HYDRA laptop and access their location, then he has a chance at saving himself and his daughter. And that kid in the StarWars hoodie. Peter. He could save him, too.
But if they find out… Scott shoves his fear down and cracks a smile instead. As the screen flickers to black, Scott pictures Cassie’s smiling face. He presses the spacebar repeatedly, trying to turn the screen back on, but instead words type across the screen: ACCESS GRANTED. TRANSFERRING LOCATION. Below it, a loading screen takes over the rest of the screen, creeping at a snail’s pace from 1% to 2% and on.
This is it, Scott thinks. Tony Stark is going to save him. They’ll take him out on a stretcher, probably, something softer than this hard-ass chair, and as the Avengers beat up the rest of Charlie’s guys (hopefully with Captain America leading the charge), he’ll get to see Cassie again. To hold her again. To—
The computer lets out an alarming mreeeeep that slices through the silence of the Room like a hot knife, and Scott’s handcuffed hands scutter, terrified, to the computer keys; make it stop, make it stop! Jesus, when they hear it, Scott will be in for it, they’d break every bone in his fucking body unless he finds a way to stop the noise —
Off, off, off! Scott spams the mute button—then the power button—and every trick in the fucking book, all while watching the loading climb to 33%, 34%, 35%—
Pounding footsteps down the hall, all coming towards him. A guttural roar. “Lang!”
No, no, no—Scott has to let it load completely, or Tony will never be able to find them. With his bound hands, he yanks the computer away from the wall—what is he thinking ? He can’t hide the screeching computer from them.
But he can try to delay them as late as possible. 40%. 41%. 42%. He slaps the laptop closed and starts to count again in his head. 43%. 44%.
He stuffs the computer under his chair, then struggles to stand on his wounded legs—
—pain spears through his legs, crackling like lightning in his smashed kneecaps, splitting through every nerve, every fiber—
—but Scott slumps back into the chair, panting. Nope. He can’t. He can’t get on one leg, let alone stand and fight back. 49%. 50%. 51%.
He’s never been much for combat, anyway. He’s more of a talk now, fight later kind of guy—that’s what hackers are, anyway. Just computer geeks with a backbone and a big mouth.
But now, he summons the dregs of courage settled at the bottom of his heart, sets his cuffed wrists on top of the computer, and puts on his ‘I’m-innocent’ face. 56%. 57%. 58%.
When Charlie slams the door open, his face straight out of the psychopathy chapter of a psychology textbook, Scott grins. “Hey, fellas! Wondering how long it would take you—this computer keeps acting up! You should’ve given me better tech, I’m telling you, in this world, it’s Microsoft or die! You know, I met Bill Gates once, he’s nice, a little weird, but once you get to know him—”
“I leave you alone for five fucking seconds —” A fist, then a blinding pain cracking through his chest. The force of the blow sends Scott tumbling out of the chair and sprawled across the cold floor. 72%. 73%. 74%.
“Hm, linoleum,” croaks Scott, running his hands across the floor. A little blood dribbles out of his mouth, and he glances—fuck, they found it—as Charlie’s gang of followers open up the laptop. “Nice touch, you got a background in interior design? My bathroom’s got linoleum, but it’s blue, not gray—”
A boot slams into his already-broken knee, and Scott screams, a wave of agony crushing him and ripping his breath away. He’s left gasping face-down on the linoleum—fucking linoleum —choking on his pain, but instead of begging for mercy he just keeps talking — “I was gonna...paint it orange, but Hope...said it was fucking ugly...no floor of hers...gonna be orange, but— fuck! ”
Another boot hammers into his ribs, and more follow, and Scott’s still talking, rambling until his voice is a dry croak; there’s blood spilling from his legs again— “Don’t touch his hands— leave his fucking hands, Mason!” —but the whole time he’s still counting. 86%. 87%. 88%.
It’s only when a shattered mass of glass and plastic and metal drops in front of his face when Scott realizes his stupid plan to get out of here was never going to work. “A fucking tracker, Lang? Did you honestly think…”
Another boot. Another fist. So many blows that Scott loses count. And eventually, after pain that threatens to tear him apart at the seams, the bliss of unconsciousness…
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 12:02 PM
Tony nearly jumps out of his own skin when the phone rings again. The tracker he set on whatever infected his computer systems faltered at 79% before blinking out completely.
Now, he’s staring at the computer screen, typing faster than his heart can race—he’s already setting up another location tracking virus, trying to—
Another briiiiing from the phone beside him. What. The. Actual. Fuck. He ignores the call; he doesn’t care who it is. Nothing else matters right now except getting Peter the fuck out of there. He tries not to think about it ( a garbled moan of pain—a horrific crunch as metal meets bone ), and hacks as quickly as he can. He knows it’s Charlie, calling with another demand, he won’t pick up. He just has to finish transferring...this one...virus… He glances up at the TV, instinctively, just to make sure Peter’s still—
—and fuck, Charlie’s beating Peter bloody, his fist pulls back to reveal the kid’s swollen face—bright red stains his front, splitting across his face, flooding from his nose—but he’s awake now, and that’s what makes it so fucking horrible—his kid is screaming please, no, stop, and Tony doesn’t have to hear the words to know what he’s saying—
—Tony doesn’t realize he’s moved across the room to the TV until he feels his fists against the heat of the screen, banging uselessly against the glass— “Peter —no, fucking—no, stop, please —” He’s spamming the redial button on his phone—he knows the number, they won’t pick up— “Pick up the phone, you FUCKING COWARDS!” He’s gone from disbelief to helplessness to fury, and now all he can feel is explosive, red-hot fear bursting through his veins. “No, no, Peter—Peter—you motherfucking sadist, leave him alone—hey! No, fuck, you have me, stop, stop, STOP!! ”
Charlie doesn’t pick up the phone until five minutes later, when Peter is whimpering and coughing and bleeding everywhere. He’s fucking shaking.
Those are the longest fucking five minutes of Tony’s entire life. He’s on his knees now, palm pressed against the TV screen, wishing he was there to hold his kid, to protect him, to comfort him...
Finally, Charlie speaks. “Rule number five, Stark. What was it?”
“I’m sorry,” gasps Tony, and his grip on the phone is airtight. “I—I won’t do it again, please—”
“Did you think I was just fucking around, Stark?” His voice slides down, a broken whistle. “You’re not hacking your way out of this one—not without watching me blow Peter Parker’s brains out.” The man on the other side of Peter pulls out his weapon, a large pistol, and slams the muzzle against Peter’s bloody head; through the phone, Tony hears him cry out through his swollen mouth in shock. A “no” dies in Tony’s throat.
His left arm’s tingling, going strangely numb, and everything starts to spin. This isn’t like combat or a roomful of reporters—this is like seeing Rhodey drop from the sky like a stone—this is like watching Pepper fall into the flames. This is fear, defenseless, its matted wings clipped by the image of Peter strapped to a chair on the screen before him.
Tony can’t breathe.
On the other end of the line, Charlie growls, “I told you not to try any of this hero business, Stark.”
The man beside Peter slams his fist against Peter’s swollen wrist. Peter gurgles in pain.
Panic spears through him; Tony gasps out, “Please.”
Charlie ignores him. “Get started on my weapon, Stark. Or it’s Parker’s head on a platter.”
Through the phone, Peter makes this sound, so weak and pained that Tony’s legs buckle beneath him.
Charlie’s voice. “You’re my bitch now, Stark.” A chuckle. “Don’t forget it.”
Click.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 1:03 PM
“Head of Security at Stark Industries,” Happy grumbles, “and you still want me to go bring him his meals?”
Pepper’s voice warns, “Happy.”
“I’m not a delivery boy, Pepper. I’ve got better things to do. FRIDAY’s shutdown’s leaving us pretty vulnerable, you know. We’ve gotta do everything manually now, gotta keep this place running—”
Pepper pushes the box into his hands. “Get someone else to take over.”
“Pepper—”
“You’re the only one he’ll listen to,” she tells him, firm. “If it was me, he’d pretend to be okay to give me peace of mind.”
Happy grunts, “Fine. But next time, I’m making one of the interns do it.”
It smells delicious.
It’s a fifteen-minute walk to Tony’s lab, and by the time he’s halfway there, Happy can’t help himself. He cracks open the box.
Good God.
It’s a brunch fit for a king (or Tony Stark, that is) of pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, and fruit. Pepper knows Tony always gets freaked when his AIs cut out.
Happy is a quick learner. The first thing he learned in this job was don’t stop Tony Stark from working. Even Pepper doesn’t generally stop him. She complains a little, here and there, and does her best to keep him healthy while he spirals through his work.
Happy plucks a piece of bacon from the box and scarfs it down. Tony won’t know the difference.
He closes the box.
Maybe one more… He opens it again.
By the time he’s knocking on the door to Tony’s lab, the box is free of its bacon, as well as two pieces of cantaloupe. “Tony!” He bangs his large fist against the door again. “Tony, open up!”
Silence.
Happy rolls his eyes. He’s probably blasting AC/DC right now, so loud that he can’t hear his knocking. “Tony! I brought your lunch!”
It takes a few minutes, but finally Tony responds, talking through the audio system installed in the door. “I’m fine,” snaps the voice on the other end. He sounds strained, like a balloon one breath away from bursting.
It’s what Happy expected, honestly. We’ll be fine, assured Happy once, when JARVIS died on a Saturday afternoon. I’m sure he’ll be up and running in no ti—
Fine? gasped Tony, in a voice that sounded far too emotionally attached to a bundle of computer code. Do I look fucking fine to you? I’m not safe! I’m not—I can’t—we’re not safe!
When JARVIS’ voice finally responded in the main building two days later, Happy and Pepper went to check on him and found him working like a maniac, wearing his clothing from two days prior, sleeves stained with coffee, eyes bloodshot.
Tony Stark is not easily shaken. But attacking his sense of security is like attacking his family.
“I don’t believe you!” Happy shouts back at him. “Remember last time?”
A growl of irritation through the speaker.
“Just take the food, Tony.”
He can hear shuffling on the other side of the door. A few beats pass, and then— “Get out of here, Happy. Now.”
FRIDAY’s shutdown must be causing him true panic, because Happy can hear it in his voice. Tony’s scared. “You’ve gotta eat sometime—”
“Get out! Now! Get out, get out! I’m working! Get the fuck out of here!”
Happy frowns.
If Tony Stark won’t eat, he can’t force the food down the man’s throat. Tony can make his own decisions. He’s got a fridge in there, anyway. He could survive a whole month in there if he wanted to, although it’d be on meals of protein bars and frozen pizza.
Happy sighs and walks away, opening up the box.
Those pancakes look goddamn delicious.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 2:25 PM
Julia enters the interrogation room with darkened hope clouding her thoughts. Their little girl was abducted yesterday, her lieutenant told her. If you help them find their girl, then you can continue with your drug addict case. There are three family members inside; she has their names written on the little girl’s case folder. The child, Cassandra Marie Paxton-Lang, was taken yesterday from her mother and stepfather, Margaret and James Paxton, after their home was attacked by several armed figures. The biological father, Scott Lang, a prominent figure in her life, has been missing for three days according to his girlfriend, a woman named Hope van Dyne. The local police are already following the trail, but they hadn’t found anything other than half a license plate number, and therefore handed all jurisdiction to Julia and her team of officers.
Julia clears her throat and pushes the door open with her hip. The mother, Margaret Paxton, rises immediately, sending her chair screeching backwards, and glares viciously at Julia; her arm is wrapped in a thick cast, and there are stitches lining a shaved section of her hairline. The stepfather tugs at her uninjured arm with a calming whisper, but she doesn’t move.
Julia is a little unnerved by the woman’s still ferocity, but it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before. Parents who have lost their children… They’re mad with desperation, so blinded by loss that they can barely think, let alone communicate logically to the police officer interrogating them. “You must be the Paxtons,” she announces, pulling up a chair. “I’m Officer Julia Paz, I—”
“They told us we were getting Officer Keene,” snapped the mother, her face hard.
Julia smiles at the couple, trying not to let her anxiety show through her teeth. “I got remarried, Mrs. Paxton. On some of the old forms, they—”
“Fine,” she snarls; like a lioness, fury glints off her teeth. “I don’t care what your name is. Just tell me how you’re gonna find my daughter.”
They’re knee-deep in dead ends and loose strings and still they’ve got nothing. “I need you to think, Ms. Van Dyne. Does your boyfriend have any enemies? Anyone he was fighting with? A stalker, maybe?”
Van Dyne bites her lip. “Not really. I mean, he was in prison for a little while, but there was no one—no, no, he doesn’t really make enemies.”
“He was in prison?”
“Yeah, but…” Scratching her head, she continues. “Look, the people we’ve had, um, arguments, with… They’re resolved. But Scott did use to, um, steal things. If there’s anyone he’d have a problem with, I guess that’d be a start.”
Julia stops typing. “Anyone else you all can think of? Anyone who could know something about this?”
Maggie and Jim rattle off a few family members and a couple of Scott’s friends, and Julia writes them all down.
After gaining as much information as she can, she dismisses the family. As she leaves, the mother grabs her by the arm. “Mrs. Paxton—” Julia starts.
“Do you have kids, Officer?” asks the woman, abrupt. Her haunted eyes watch her face.
“Two,” she admits.
Maggie tilts her chin up and Julia sees herself mirrored in this mother’s eyes. “All I have is Cassie—she’s my whole world, you understand?” Her eyes glaze over as her voice shakes, and her husband tugs at her arm. “Understand? ”
“I understand, Mrs. Pa—”
“She’s all I have!” Now Maggie sobs into her hands, and her husband steers her towards the door.
When he looks back at Julia, she realizes his face matches his wife’s. He looks...broken, somehow, a cracked window. “Find her,” he begs. “Please.”
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 3:09 PM
There’s a small voice in the back of his head, prying at his blender of a brain. Mister… Mister… Are you…
His skin feels like ice, numb to the touch, and his muscles are jelly. Worst of all, there’s pain drumming through his body—a tender knot at the back of his skull, combat bruises peppering his torso, discomfort zigzagging between his ribs, a swollen, throbbing wrist, a sensitive bruise on his face, and a horrible spike of pain rendering his left hand useless. He tries to move, but his battered body won’t allow it, especially not while under the influence of this foreign drug.
The tinny voice beside him grows more frantic, breaking into confused sobs. A kid’s sobs.
Peter forces his eyes open, blinking to clear the haze of pain from his brain. There’s a little girl in front of him with a smear of blood on her cheek; she looks Asian, maybe half-Japanese or half-Korean, with long, dark hair. She’s wearing pink pants speckled with shooting stars, a purple shirt with “Sparkle Like A Unicorn” printed across the front of it in glitter. Over it, she wears a sparkly blue hoodie with a pair of belugas swimming across the back, although there’s blood spotting all the way down her sleeves. She’s got one hand clenched on the hem of her T-shirt while the other pokes his uninjured cheek, and she’s saying something. “...hey, Mister, wake up, wake—whoa!”
Peter pushes himself up with a groan, and she stumbles backward in surprise. She’s scared ; not the kind of scared that Ned’s baby sister Daisy shows when her mom scolds her, but the kind of scared that douses your mind in gasoline, the kind where any spark will send flames of panic burning through your veins. The little girl is pale, trembling like a leaf, and watching him with wide, cautious eyes. “H-hey,” he says, trying to move his numb tongue, “I’m Peter. What’s your name?”
“Cassie,” she says carefully. She watches as Peter shifts, propping himself against the wall, his good arm curled around his torso. Finally, he takes in his surroundings; the room’s minuscule, probably not meant for two people. It’s about fifteen feet one way and ten feet the other way. There’s a toilet and a sink crammed into the left corner, furthest from the door, and a ratty bed (with a mattress to match) in the other corner, just a few feet away from the door. All are bolted to the floor. There's a bucket on the other side of the bed, too, but there's nothing inside. Peter’s currently sitting right next to the bed, and he grabs onto the metal railing with his right hand, trying to steady himself. He’d hoped for some metal screws or exposed wires he could use to break them out of here, but so far all he sees are smooth, blank walls, save a lone, fluorescent light in a cage on the ceiling streaming uneven light across the entire room. The door’s similar—dull, even metal, not even a handle on the inside. There’s no window either, only a tiny slot for food.
“Cassie,” Peter repeats, giving her a pained smile. “That’s a” —he winces— “a pretty name.”
Everything reeks of vibranium metal—a distinct odor like rust—and an ill feeling lingers in his gut, like a hot roux burnt black. He's Spider-man—of course he's been kidnapped before, but nothing like this. Peter scans the room. Vibranium walls. Vibranium doors. Wow—whoever these people are, they really did their homework.
Cassie’s gaze flickers down to his hand. “You’re bleeding,” she comments, trying to sound brave, “a lot.”
Peter glances down at his hand. It’s not spraying blood, which is good, and he’s happy to feel the familiar tingle of his super-healing at work, but there’s a terrifying amount of red oozing into a puddle on the ground beside him—no wonder the kid is scared. “Oh,” he says simply. “Don’t worry.” He wills his hands to stick (almost an unconscious thought at this point), and feels a familiar, adhesive substance coat his palm and fingers; he spreads the sticky liquid over the open wound, letting it seep in from both sides, and the flow of blood slows from dangerous to annoying. Then he grabs a section of his T-shirt and (he wishes May could be here to see him tear his favorite shirt, she’d be horrified) tears a section from the bottom, which is, surprisingly, harder than it looks. He winds the makeshift bandage around his palm, knotting it with his teeth. “See?”
Cassie nods, wary.
Reexamining the bloody spots on Cassie’s jacket, Peter points a shaky finger in her direction. “Did they hurt you, too?”
The dark-haired girl flinches, pain flashing across her face; regret drips down Peter’s throat. She nods again. “Daddy’s gonna come get me,” she whispers. “He’s gonna save me.”
Peter’s spent enough time with Ned’s sister, Daisy, to know not to correct kids when they think their parents are coming. Besides, he’s not asking for a meltdown—he just wants to make sure this little girl isn’t going to bleed out any time soon. She’s about as thin as a paper clip, so Peter’s guessing any loss of blood will leave her dizzy and upset. “Okay, okay,” he agrees. “How about you come over here? I’ll fix up your cuts like I did mine. You can tell me about your dad.”
She shuffles over slowly. “Are you a doctor?”
Peter smiles. “No, kiddo. Just a guy with magic hands. I’m like, uh, Harry Houdini!” He waves his right hand for dramatic effect.
“Are you gonna hurt me?” she says, even quieter.
Awful, sinking revulsion crawls into his stomach and squirms. He knew it before, but now it’s real. Someone hurt this little kid—she’s probably six or seven years old, barely bigger than Daisy, and someone cut open her arms and left her to bleed. “No,” he says firmly, meeting her eyes. “I’m just gonna stop the bleeding.” He tries to hold back his tears, but he’s always been an easy crier. Ned knows—Peter sobbed through The Fault In Our Stars and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and any other movie where someone died; whenever May cries, he always finds himself crying, too. It isn’t a great move for a high school student still trying to make his way through a thousand and one social bubbles, but nonetheless, his vision still blurs when Cassie approaches him, arm held out with the rest of her body curled up like a tight rubber band, her eyes squeezed shut. “It’s okay…” he says. “Cassie. Look at me.” She’s still tense, like he’s about to slap her or punch her or cut her arm open again. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m one of the good guys, okay?”
Cassie presses her back against the wall beside him. She is so, so confused–it’s written all over her face. “They hurt you,” she whispers.
Peter smiles emptily. “Yeah.”
She frowns. “Did you do something bad?”
Peter is still, and he takes a moment to just feel, feel the level of pain he is in. “No,” he tells her. “I didn’t.” Pain flares in his arm.
“Then why did they hurt you?” She backs away a little, sliding a few inches away from him. “Are you bad?”
“No.” Peter wants to go to sleep and never wake up, but instead he forces his eyes to the little girl’s. Spider-Man would comfort her, tell that they’ll defeat the bad guys and get out of here, but instead he lets out a strained sigh. “I don’t know why, they just…” He can barely remember the torture: hints of familiar voices, aching pain, cold metal, I’ll do it–I’ll do it, I’ll make your fucking weapon— He shivers. “Some people just like hurting other people.”
Cassie is quiet for a moment. The drip, drip, drip of the faucet echoes rhythmically from the other side of the room. “Do you?”
“Nah,” says Peter, trying to sound nonchalant as pain suddenly erupts in his arm. “I told you, I’m one of the good guys, kid.”
“Promise?”
A tiny, bloodspattered hand appears before him, clear in the pain clouding Peter’s brain, one pinky up.
Peter hooks his pinky finger in hers. “Pinky promise,” he swears.
For the first time since he met her, little Cassie smiles.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 5:14 PM
Only one of the little girls’ neighbors actually saw anything. She goes with her partner, Officer Jimmy Woo; he’s a bit too friendly for a police officer, but he’s growing on her. He somehow starts a whole conversation with the witness about dog breeds, and she swears she wants to knock him onto the floor. “Did you see any distinguishing features of the culprits?” she asks, cutting Woo off as he goes into a rant about labradoodles. “Any tattoos, any facial hair, anything?”
The woman shakes her head. “Only the woman—the one with red hair. That’s all I remember.”
“Any names? Can you remember anything that they said?”
Her face scrunches in thought. “No… I’m sorry, it all happened so fast … Just yelling, that’s it.”
Julia shakes her down for as much information as she can, but once they’re done, she knows they’ve hit a wall. It’s been almost 36 hours since Cassie Paxton-Lang was abducted, and all they have is three letters of a license plate, a hair color, and a vehicle type. It’s not nearly enough. But her sergeant didn’t just give her the case because they were understaffed; he did it, she knows, because Julia is damn good at her job.
“Check the ex-husband’s burglary victims,” she orders Woo, remembering what Cassie’s family said. Right now, they had nothing to help them find this little girl, and with every minute that passed, the chances of finding her alive grew slimmer. “Let’s find ourselves a lead.”
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 6:51 PM
It’s time.
They’ve set seven o’clock as the official time to call Stark, every day, so now it’s time to take that Spidey-kid out of his cell.
He sends his two biggest guys to take him, and he stands outside and watches as they do it.
The girl starts screaming as soon as they open the door. And the boy, still heavily drugged with the shit they gave him, jumps to his feet, swaying dangerously, and falls back down.
His men, Matt and Nick, enter the room; the girl’s screams collapse into pitiful sobs. “Hey—hold on, fellas,” starts Parker, scooting back against the bed, holding his broken wrist to his chest. “Ask me on a date first—”
Nick grabs his ankle and pulls him, hard, across the cement floor, and when the kid’s head meets concrete he hisses in pain, but he twists his leg from Nick’s grip and thrashes wildly.
This is taking too long. “Get the fucking kid!” he growls.
Matt gets a few good hits in; the kid’s too drugged to truly fight back, But clearly the drugs didn’t touch his brain, because he slaps both hands down on the floor and tenses up.
Nick yanks hard at the kid’s legs. He doesn’t budge.
“The hell?” Matt growls.
Nick pulls again, harder. Nothing.
The Spider-Kid stuck his fucking hands to the floor.
Charlie can feel rage seep into his brain, and all at once his vision goes red. “Get off the fucking floor, Parker!”
Parker doesn’t move. If anything, he clings harder to the concrete.
Charlie steps into that fucking tiny room and sticks his gun into the back of Parker’s neck. “Get off,” he hisses, “the floor. Or Stark’s gonna know just what spider brains look like.”
“You won’t,” the teen answers slowly, “because you need me.”
Charlie wants to smash this kid into the fucking ground and rips his face off with his teeth. Instead, he grabs his head and slams his face into the ground. “Get up!”
Lang’s girl screams from the corner, and Peter startles.
Charlie grins. He’s a fucking genius.
He grabs Peter by the hair. “Get up,” he repeats, “or I’ll make that little girl bleed again.”
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 7:06 PM — DAY 1
Peter’s furious with himself, tugging at his bound arms in a frenzy. He forgot about little Cassie for two fucking seconds, and then they got the upper hand. If he’d remembered that it wasn’t only him, then they could’ve been both free by now.
The drug’s still coursing through him, dizzyingly cold, but its effect has waned. Why can’t he break out of these restraints? Rope and steel can’t hold him, so what is—
Oh.
Vibranium.
It smells like vibranium. He couldn’t break out of this chair even if he was at his full strength.
Peter’s heart rate picks up. Who are these people? This chair is made of vibranium, and the cell he was in reeks of it, too. The people he faces are usually desperate, like muggers and addicts and thieves, or structured, like villains and psychopaths. These people are a strange mix of the two.
He winces. The pain comes and goes in waves, aching from head to toe. “...please, please don’t make me do this—he’s just a kid—he’s not—”
A slap. “You’ve done it before, Lang. Come on. Call him.”
Peter’s not stupid. Once the guy in charge—Charlie—started talking, he figured it out pretty quickly. They’d kidnapped him to blackmail Mr. Stark into making a weapon for them.
He laughs, as much as one can with a swollen, bloody face. Didn’t they know who Mr. Stark was? Mr. Stark had been blackmailed more times than Peter could count, and they’d never worked—
“Something funny, freak?” the man, Charlie, asked.
Peter shrugged; pain spiked down his arm, and he immediately regretted it. “Eh, nothing. Just… Your socks are untied.”
Charlie grabs his poorly bandaged arm and squeezes, hard, digging his thumb into the wound. Peter chokes on the sudden pain. “I get enough talk out of Lang—I don’t need any from you.”
Peter’s about to make a sharp comeback when he spots the man in the corner, huddled behind a computer, blood staining his chin and the front of his shirt. He’s typing rapidly, looking up every once in a while to glance at Charlie.
Fuck.
He looks like he’s been ripped apart at the seams. His face is blackened with bruises, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth thick and swollen. And his legs… Nausea writhes in Peter’s gut.
Peter shuts up.
“Good boy,” sneers Charlie, and then he kicks at the other man’s chair. The man jerks back, his handcuffs jingling. “Lang?”
“Yeah—um, yes. It’s ringing.”
Peter recognizes that voice. It’s… Shit, why couldn’t he remember?
Charlie shifts his feet beside him. “Lights, camera, action,” he says, in a loud whisper. “Mason, you have my tools?”
“Yeah.” Someone pushes a metal cart forward, and its wheels screech over the ground.
Peter hears that oh-so-familiar sound of a phone picking up, and his stomach drops. “I’m not done yet,” says the voice on the other line. “I need more time…”
It’s Mr. Stark’s voice.
He sounds freaked.
“Mr. Stark?” calls out Peter. “Can you hear me?”
Charlie slaps his hand over his mouth, a warning.
Peter stops moving.
Mr. Stark’s voice goes from weary to intensely concerned. He’s never heard him like this, not even when Peter woke up in the medbay after taking a bullet to the chest. “Pete? You okay, kid? I’m gonna fix this, I fucking swear, don’t—”
“Now’s not the time for chit-chat,” snaps Charlie. “You got my weapon, Stark?”
Mr. Stark’s grainy voice on the other end. “No, I haven’t got the—I’ve barely got blueprints! I don’t just shit technology, you fucker, that’s not how it— don’t fucking touch him! ”
Beside him, Charlie’s shaking in frustration, holding something cold and metallic against his neck; Peter can practically hear his teeth grinding together. “What’s rule number three, Stark?” growls the man.
As Charlie removes his hand from Peter’s mouth, Mr. Stark continues, “I don’t know, I don’t know—”
A click, and something hisses beside his ear. Something hot. Peter suddenly grows wildly tense. “Don’t worry, Mr. Stark,” he babbles, cutting off Charlie as he talks again. His body trembles. “I’ll be fine—everything’s gonna be okay—I’ll get out of here, you know I can do it, I’ll get everyone out of here, I can do it, don’t worry, you don’t have to—”
The man on the other side grabs his head and pins it to one side of the chair; Peter lets out a cry of surprise and then keeps on talking, because if he doesn’t stop talking then he’s gonna think about how loud Mr. Stark is screaming into the phone and how much sweat is coming down the side of his face and how much it’s gonna fucking hurt— “I’ve got it, don’t worry about me, I’m okay, don’t worry—”
The heat singes his ear and the side of his head lights up in splitting agony.
Somewhere beneath the mountains and valleys of Peter’s own screams, he can hear Mr. Stark’s sobs.
When the pain finally wanes and his sticky hands unclench from the vibranium armrests, he realizes something.
He’s never heard Mr. Stark cry before.
SATURDAY, APRIL 7 — 10:29 PM
Charlie’s coming down from a high when the phone finally rings.
He picks up after the second ring. “Yeah?”
A low voice. “Did you get them?”
“Yep.”
“All three?”
“Yeah, yeah, I told you we got ‘em. Antman, the girl, and Spider-Man. We already called Stark—he’s pissing himself silly trying to make my weapon.”
“Our weapon, Keene. Don’t forget who’s funding your little project here.”
“Yeah, sorry, boss.”
“I need you to keep this under control. If” —the man’s voice drops to a threatening whisper— “Stark breathes one word to Potts or anyone else, then the whole operation falls apart. We can’t let that happen. If he talks to anyone…”
“I’ll rip that kid apart.”
A pleased hum. “Right. I’ll check in again in a couple of days. And Keene?”
“Yeah, Secretary Ross?”
“Don’t fuck this up.”