breathing smoke
SATURDAY, MAY 27 — 7:53 PM
May Parker has been Ned’s emergency contact on every form since he met Peter when they were twelve. His parents were always much stricter than May, so when he and Peter got into trouble, it was always May Parker who pulled them out. Not that they got into a lot of trouble in the first place. But when the occasion did strike, they knew who to call.
When they snuck out to Comic-Con, May was there. When they got stuck in a blizzard with nothing but their driver’s permits and their winter coats, May was there. Whenever he wanted to stay overnight, May let him. She was the kind of person who was always ready to give someone a place on the couch and a meal. He’s spent so much time at Peter’s apartment, so much time with May on trips to Central Park and random Thai places. Even his parents are friends with May. She’s like a second mom to him. As close to an aunt as one can get.
Now, he supposes, he’s the same thing for her.
After school most days—and sometimes all day—he stays at the hospital and does his homework in May’s hospital room. Visiting hours at the hospital go from ten in the morning to eight in the evening, and Ned usually stays until they close. He tells his parents that he joined a club—a tutoring group at school—to get them off of his back.
Today, Ned doesn’t do homework. He doesn’t even read any Star Trek to May. He just calls and calls and calls Peter’s phone, knowing what he’ll find on the other end: Hey, this is Peter. I’m probably busy, so just text me or leave a message or whatever. Catch you later! He doesn’t even try calling Tony Stark, not since the billionaire warned him not to. Mr. Stark hasn’t called him back since that first time. Ned hasn’t called back, and he hasn’t told a soul. Peter’s disappearance is something that might have to die with him.
He’s mid-dial when the nurse comes into May’s hospital room. She has a new nurse now: Nurse Rae, a tall woman with both eyebrows pierced and a mess of shaggy green hair. “You’re still here,” the nurse says, surprised.
“Yep,” says Ned, without much feeling. He stays where he is, seated beside May at the windowed wall.
“You know, visiting hours end in like” —the green-haired nurse checks her digital watch— “seven minutes. And you’ve been here all day.”
“Yep,” he repeats.
After the nurse finishes her work—exchanging the liquid bag in May’s IV, checking her vitals, and checking her brain activity—she sits beside Ned in the second visitor’s chair, hands on her knees. “Ned,” she says. “Listen. “I know I’m probably not supposed to tell you this because you’re not technically family of the Jane Doe, but she doesn’t really have any family. You might be the closest thing she has to family right now.” She rubs her hands together, and he notices that she’s got an engagement ring on her finger. “Jane Doe’s been showing early signs of waking from her coma. Brain activity, reflexes, stuff like that. It’s not much, but it’s something—her doctor’s concluded she’s got about a fifty percent chance of waking up.”
Ned pinches at his fingertips. Fifty percent? So, odds are that she’s gonna be like this forever. “I don’t even know her,” he lies.
“Sure,” agrees the nurse, “but you do care, don’t you? Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
Ned gives a half-hearted shrug. His backpack’s on the floor; Ned’s got homework to do, lots of it, but he could care less about calculus and literary devices. “I have a friend like her,” he tries to explain, but he doesn’t even know what he means. “He…”
Rae nods; she doesn’t interrupt.
“My friend…” He shrugs again. “He’s dead,” he lies, but it sounds so true. “Car accident.”
“Like the Jane Doe,” observes the nurse. “Is that why you stay?”
He shrugs. “I guess.” He doesn’t care because… because… “Today’s his birthday.”
“Your friend?”
“Yeah.”
“What was his name?”
Ned feels the stone in his throat grow, feels the edge of it stretch at his throat, threatening to break free. “Peter.” There’s so much more he could say. We were best friends , he could tell her. We’ve been inseparable since we were twelve, he could. He could tell them about all the Lego sets they’ve built together—but that seems so stupid now. Ned would happily melt all of his Legos, tear up all of his comic books, burn all of his tee shirts, trash all of his Star Wars merch—if he could just see Peter again. He could say, We ate lunch together every day. He could tell her about how much he ate as Spider-Man, or about how much he loved Thai food.
He could tell her all of this. But he doesn’t.
The nurse just nods, staring out into the distance. “I’m sorry about Peter.”
Hot tears slip out, making their way down his face despite his efforts to stop them. Furiously, he rubs them away with his sleeves. “Me, too.”
Happy Birthday to Peter. If he’s even alive to see it.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6 — 4:43 PM
They’ve had another overdose.
It’s a guy Riri doesn’t even know that well: Lyle, a skinny meth-head who’d only just starting take PCP like Charlie.
Charlie calls that Ross guy almost immediately. “What do I do?” Charlie snaps. He’s already low, and because Lyle took the rest of his stash, he’s not happy. “Man’s gonna stink up the place.”
Ross gives them specific instructions: mess up the face, take the body out to the city, drop it in Mott Haven or Hunts Point or somewhere else where the crime rate’s so high that the police won’t think twice about it.
So they do.
Riri’s not part of the drop-off crew; Charlie sends Mason, Jon, and Glenn to do it. They wrap the body up in plastic and dump it in the back of Nick’s truck.
Riri liked Lyle. He was always sweet, giving the kids vitamins and toothpaste when they needed it. He was going on and off again with Megan, the girl who Charlie tried to strangle a couple weeks ago. She’s been self-medicating so many opiates and benzos since that incident that she barely responded when she found out.
But Lyle’s not even the worst part. The main problem is, after kind Lyle kicked it, his girlfriend Megan and Lyle’s closest friend, Mateo, got so wasted—with decades-old booze they found in the lower levels of the bunker, and on little blue benzodiazepine pills taken three at a time—that they took off with the other car—an old Honda that originally belonged to Charlie. The pair have yet to come back, but in the state that they left… Odds are, they’ll end up crashed into a tree or another car on their way off the mountains. With those two gone, they’ll only have a few people left. They’ve had too many deaths. RJ, the first overdose. The second, a girl she barely knew. Third, some guy Charlie found messing with his wife—Charlie took a couple doses and beat the guy to death with his bare hands.
There’ve been a couple others, but Riri can’t keep track of everyone—overdoses, other people Charlie beat to death while on dust... They started with a group of twenty, including Charlie and herself, and now they’re down to ten. Charlie’s crew was barely functional to start with… And now they’re down to a group so small that they'd be risking their lives daily trying to keep the kid under lock and key.
So Charlie gets Ross on the phone again, as the rest of them wait for their friends’ return. “We need more people,” he says. “I don’t care how you find them, or whatever, but we need more.”
By the end of the day, the news comes in on the local news channel: A young man and a young woman drove their vehicle through a White Mountain campground tonight, killing a young family of five from Concord who were camping there for the week. Both were killed in the incident, bringing the total death count up to seven tonight. Toxicology reports already suggest that both the passenger and the driver were both under the influence. One has already been identified as Megan Kinney, a nineteen-year-old college student who was reported missing back in April by her family. Concord mourns the loss of the Wright family: parents Heather Wright and Jack Wright, and including six-year-old Leo and eight-year-old…
They’re down to ten now. If they want to keep this project under control—this project, this plan to save the world—then they need more people.
FRIDAY, JUNE 8 — 9:15 AM
The morgue reeks of shit. Literally.
When she wrinkles her nose, the medical examiner gives her and Agent Woo a close-lipped smile. “That’d be the cadaverine,” he says. “Also, putrescine. Skatole. All chemicals the body releases after death. Formaldehyde doesn’t cover up all the smells, you know.”
On her other side, Agent Jimmy Woo is trying his best to breathe through his nose.
The medical examiner, a dark-haired man named Dr. Alistor, opens the door and leads them into another room, one with walls of cold lockers and a row of six or seven embalming tables. On the last table is what they’re here for: the body of a male PCP addict who was found last night in Mott Haven in the Bronx. “Alright, here we go—we’ve got a white male, twenty-six years old, positively identified as Lyle Getz. He was born in Durham, North Carolina, wanted for connections to several drug-related crimes, and had been in six different rehab facilities by the age of twenty.”
“Looks way older than twenty,” she says.
“Yep, meth’ll do that to you. Turns a regular guy into, well…” He gestures vaguely at the corpse. “That.”
The guy couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. He’s unhealthily skinny, and his skin is covered in marks, like the ones kids get from scratching bug bites. Officer Paz hooks her thumbs on her belt and leans in close to the body. It smells about as pleasant as it looks. She knows ‘Lyle Getz’ as one of Charlie’s old addict buddies, someone he’d mentioned on the phone a couple times, but Lyle had ultimately disappeared along with the others back in April. “Can I see your report?”
Dr. Alistor hands her the report—a stack of three or four pages, all titled with Lyle’s full name.. She reads it quickly, skimming for the important parts: cause and manner of death.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Lethal overdose due to combined high levels of phencyclidine, methamphetamine, and alcohol
MANNER OF DEATH: Accidental
“No violent wounds,” adds the medical examiner, with a glint of his green eyes, “although we did find splashes of someone else’s blood on his clothes—DNA analysis of that blood is already going through the forensics.”
Could be Charlie’s. God, she’s been diving so deep into Cassie Paxton-Lang’s case that she’s been slacking on her most important case: finding her brother Charlie.
Dr. Alistor continues, “Severe dental loss. Sores on face and body…” As he speaks, Julia spots a stretch of black-blue ink curling around Lyle’s calf. A tattoo. “Have you seen this?”
Alistor glances down at the leg. “Seen what?”
She prods the cadaver’s pasty skin. Even his leg hair is sparse, much like the stringy hair on his head. This kind of deterioration only comes from years upon years of drug abuse. Lifting the calf and peeking beneath, she spots a shape—something dark and symmetrical. “What is it?”
“Pretty sure it’s a tattoo, Officer,” deadpans the medical examiner.
Julia wants to glare at the man, but she needs his assistance so she smiles gently. “Okay, but the symbol —have you seen something like this before?” She can’t quite get a good look. Are those…snakes? Arms?
“Unfortunately,” he says dryly, “it’s not my job to uncover the meaning of random artistic symbols.”
“Then, can we turn him over?”
The medical examiner is not amused. However, with the help of a mortician’s assistant and Agent Woo, they get the body flipped over.
The tattoo is in dark blue ink—it looks recent. It pictures a centered skull with octopus arms coming out of it, but it’s nothing too complex. “If you had to guess, how recently do you think this tattoo was given?”
The man purses his lips. His green eyes are mildly annoyed, it seems, by the question. “Eh, a month? Maybe less. Seems fresh.”
Officer Paz continues, “Were there any other marks that you could find? Scars? Wounds?”
“If I did,” says the man, as cold as ever. “It’d be in the report.”
Julia Paz ignores the man and ties her hair back in a ponytail for a closer look. There are only six tentacles in the design; each is lined with trapezoidal suckers and ends in a near-circular curl. “Jimmy,” she says, addressing her partner, “have you ever seen anything like this? This…octopus symbol? It seems familiar…” He doesn’t answer at first. hearing him move behind her, she turns to look at him. He's craning to look at the symbol, his mouth slightly open. “Woo?”
“Yeah,” he blurts suddenly. “Yes, Julia—I think I have.” yet the man doesn’t elaborate; he simply stares open-mouthed at the corpse’s tattoo. “You know I used to work with SHIELD…”
“Yeah?”
“Well that symbol… That’s not an octopus. It’s supposed to represent a hydra—from Greek mythology?” Agent Woo points in turn at the tentacles. “It’s a water monster killed by Hercules; it was nearly impossible to kill because if you cut off one head” —he gestures to the skull-like head on the tattoo— “two more grow back.”
“Officers?” announces the medical examiner, from the other side of the body. “As much as I’d like to solve the mystery of the tattoo, my name isn’t Nancy Drew—I have other clients, other corpses—so if you’re done with the body, you can talk to the front desk about getting a more detailed report.”
Before they go, she gives the medical examiner a digitized list of the people she’s looking for; it’s mostly a list that Ty gave her back in April. It’s vague, and there’s not much there, but hopefully it’s enough to keep this case open. She has to find Charlie.
They get a call from the police department in New Hampshire: two of the addicts on Julia Paz’s list were found dead, having killed three people when their car drove through a campsite on the White Mountains. They take the next day to drive up and observe the bodies, they find something similar: tattoos of the hydra-octopus creature again—one on the female addict’s ankle and one on the male addict’s shoulder. The tattoos are freely drawn—by no means professional—but they’re definitely identical.“It’s not just about the creature,” explains Jimmy Woo as they observe Megan Kinney’s corpse and the matching tattoo on her ankle. “This symbol is from an organization: one that threatened SHIELD in 2014, but has been a global threat ever since. I wasn’t a part of SHIELD when it happened, but every SHIELD officer knows about them.”
Officer Paz frowns. “Knows about who?”
“HYDRA,” says Jimmy with a grimace. “A group deadset on world domination and a new world order.”
FRIDAY, JUNE 8 — 7:50 PM
Dr. Leonard Skivorski lives in the operating room now.
In one corner, he keeps a pile of food they’ve provided him—vacuum-sealed packs of powdered potatoes, cans of corn, packages of raw oats, freeze-dried sausage—that mostly come from storage closets around the facility.
He spends most of his time cataloging the medical supplies, devising plans to escape, and scribbling letters on medical notepads—to his son, to his ex-wife, to his coworkers, to his friends. Even to his father, who he hasn’t spoken to in years.
There’s a bathroom down the hall; when he has to go, he alerts the guard by his door and is personally escorted.
No shower, though. Instead, he washes himself in the pre-operative sinks with the same soap he used to use before surgery: chlorhexidine gluconate, a liquid antiseptic. He’s starting to understand why Peter and that little girl were in such horrific shape when he first met them. He’s never been in the cell, but Peter has described it to him: barely bigger than a closet, just enough to fit a bed, toilet, and sink.
Every day, the doctor waits for them to drag Peter to his operating room; every day, he fixes Peter up as best he can before sending him back to confinement.
Today, Peter arrives shortly after eight o’clock, carried between two large men, bloodied and shaking like a leaf. They drop him inside the operating room doors and relock them with him inside.
Peter doesn’t get up right away; he stays where he is: palms on the concrete, belly down, cheek touching ground. His prisoner’s uniform is darkened by sweat, his hair plastered to his forehead. The doctor tries, “Peter?” and the kid flinches—a full-bodied jerk—curling his arms over his head. “Okay,” Dr. Skivorski says now, his voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s okay. Just me, hon.”
The boy doesn’t say anything. He’s still on the ground, shaking, taking in heaping gulps of air. In the past few weeks, it’s always like this. He just needs some time, some time to figure out that he’s not in that room anymore. Dr. Skivorski knows better than to approach the kid when he’s like this. Instead, he stays by the operating table, placing a fresh set of linens onto it in preparation for the kid.
Quietly, the doctor asks, “They get your head today?”
The kid takes a second, breathing hard. “No,” he says finally. He’s breathing, but each breath catches about halfway up before he exhales, like a rusty door hinge.
“Can I come to you?”
Peter just gasps on the floor, fast and shaky, and he’s breathing so hard and so erratically that he starts gagging, rolling onto his side to cough out clear liquid. “W-wait…” he coughs, with a sense of fear that curdles the doctor’s stomach. “Wait…”
It takes a few minutes for the kid to calm down; by the time the doctor finally gets Peter onto the table, he’s still shaking and won’t look him in the eye, choosing instead to stare wide-eyed at the door. “They’re not coming back,” he assures the boy.
“They always come back,” Peter says with an odd shake of his head.
The kid refuses to lie down and breathes in sharply every time the doctor moves to touch him, so he has to go slowly, much slower than he’s used to treating his pediatric patients, even the little ones. Peter’s still quiet, coughing a couple times a minute; the doctor wants to check his chest, but the kid won’t let him get close enough with the stethoscope. “Can you—can you tell me what they did to you, hon?”
Peter’s still staring at the door, inhaling deeply through his nose. “I didn’t, um.” He blinks and shakes his head again. “Didn’t… didn’t know… what it even was. I know—I know… Mr. Stark used to—used to say—” The doctor shifts, and the kid flinches and wraps his arms around himself. His breathing is coming out in little hums, his croaky voice scraping in his throat. “I didn’t…know…” He’s shaking his head again. “He said they… in Afghanistan…”
There’s no marks on the kid—at least, no new marks since yesterday. What the hell did they do to him to make him so damn scared?
“He’s afraid of, um” —the kid looks like he’s gonna be sick— “water… P-pools, rain, anything… But I didn’t know… Di-didn’t know… Never looked… Never looked it up. I thought… I thought… I thought it had something with drowning, but I…” The kid’s trembling. That’s when something clicks for the doctor—it’s not sweat plastering his hair to his forehead and soaking the torso of his prisoner’s jumpsuit. It’s water . “I didn’t know, man… I didn’t know that they…” He mimes something vague, waving around his face, before hugging himself again.
This time, Charlie waterboarded the kid.
Peter’s shaking his head, shaking his head, shaking his head. “The chair…” This must be why his voice is so hoarse, why he keeps coughing and gagging. “It… It goes back… They laid it back, and tied me down, and the… The…” He starts gagging again, hand over his mouth, and the doctor sees it. His wrists are torn up, bleeding slightly, the skin there so worn from his restraints that the doctor can see raw muscle. He fought so hard against his cuffs that he’s bleeding.
“Okay,” says the doctor, as quiet and calming as he can. “Okay, hon, you’re okay… I’ve got you now…” Shining in the harsh operating light, Peter’s face is wet, but whether it’s from tears or water, the doctor doesn’t know. “Lemme get a good look at you, okay?”
The kid nods like a kid to a teacher, but he doesn’t move from where he is, white-knuckling the operating table, sitting stiffly in front of the doctor. When the doctor draws the stethoscope close with one hand, the kid flinches, his shoulders popping up by his ears.
He might have to wait a little longer to be able to treat the kid today.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20 — 10:32 AM
Pepper wants nothing more than a bowl of lemon jello.
Lemon anything, really. Lemon tarts. Lemonade, lemon slushiest. Lemon bars, lemon meringue. It doesn’t even have to be sweet—if she had one right now, she’d squeeze a lemon into an empty glass and drink it straight.
She knew that pregnant cravings were real, but not that they’d be so damn distracting . By the time her meeting’s over, Pepper dashes to the staff lounge and unearths—perfect!—a packaged lemon scone she stashed there the day before.
Each bite is like heaven . She finds herself eating two, three—and then the entire scone—and brushing off the crumbs when finally someone knocks on the lounge door. It’s one of the board members, an elderly man who has long has a stake in the company, and he clears his throat. “Ms. Potts,” he says. “Are we sure about this decision?”
She knows the decision he means. In the absence of Tony (for over two months now), she is taking the legal step of removing him from company decision-making. Temporarily, of course. By invoking a medical clause in company contracts, she can make sure that every one of his responsibilities is transferred to other high-ranking members of the company. It’s a matter of keeping everything in line. “Yes. Absolutely.”
The man winces. “Okay, Ms. Potts, but—”
“But what—”
The man falters under her stare. “Nevermind.”
She sighs; she straightens, and she becomes CEO of Stark Industries Pepper Potts. “If Mr. Stark,” she replies curtly, “wishes to be part of Stark Industries again, he will have every opportunity to do so. But until then… We must move on. Decisions must be made. Actions must be taken. We don’t need to wait for an okay from Stark when he refuses to even leave the laboratory or contact any members of his company. It’s a matter of” —keeping that asshole out of her life— “efficiency. If we don’t keep going, the company will deteriorate.”
The man nods so much he looks like a bobblehead. “Yes, of course,” he replies, and the man excuses himself before disappearing into the hallway.
No one else comes to bother her. She doesn’t have any more meetings until noon, so she heads back to the main building. in the fridge, thank god, are individual cups of lemon jello. She takes a couple cups and sits at the kitchen counter with some paperwork.
It’s not long before Happy is there to join her. “Happy,” she says, as though annoyed, although Pepper’s sure her voice betrays some relief. “I thought I mentioned that the main house wasn’t for work.”
“This isn’t a work call, Pepper,” he says. “This is about Peter.”
“Hm,” says Pepper.
“Parker,” he clarifies.
Pepper wants to slap him. “Yes, I know. ” Hopefully, her face doesn’t betray her subsequent rush of embarrassment. How could she have forgotten about Peter? She’s been spending so much time worrying about prenatal medications and ultrasounds and Babies-R-Us that she completely forgot that the kid was currently unresponsive. That kid spent so many hours at their place upstate that Tony bought an air mattress in case he wanted to sleep there—not that he ever told Peter that. “How is he? Having fun in Alaska?”
“Not…exactly. I still haven’t been able to locate him.”
“Still?” She thought internships, especially ones as far as Alaska, tried not to pull anyone out of school for too long. “Have you been able to track his phone? Tony did that once, by pinging the IMEI, you could—”
Happy shakes his head. “Believe me, I’ve tried everything. His phone’s completely off the grid. So either he’s somewhere without any cell towers—”
“Well, that’s Alaska, isn’t it?”
“—or something happened to his phone.”
“Okay,” starts Pepper, “so what do you need from me? We should probably locate the kid soon—isn’t school ending?”
Happy nods. “Tomorrow, actually. It’s their last day.” Oh. “Remember, you mentioned you could contact his friends for me? Or give me their contact information, at least? I figure, with tomorrow being their last day, it’s now or never to see if they have some way to contact the kid.”
That conversation feels like forever ago. Like a dream. “Oh. Oh—sure. Sure. Absolutely. One second.” She looks around herself for her phone, but she can’t find it. With a grimace, Happy taps the counter on her right side. Her phone’s on the counter beside her. “Right. Thanks.” She taps it open, clicks on ‘Contacts,’ and finds Peter’s friends: MJ and Ned. The kids are still labeled Tony’s way: MJ is ‘That Girl From Hamilton’ and Ned is ‘Fred Weeds.’ Pepper knows good and well that Tony knows those kids’ names. The thought of him pretending to forget again makes a smile ghost her face.
“Pepper?”
She blinks.
Happy clears his throat. “So, can you send them to me?”
“Oh—sorry, sure.” She texts Happy the contact information before the man can ask again.
Before he leaves, however, he raps at the counter with his knuckles. “One more thing, Pepper.” It’s the way he says it that makes it near-obvious what he knows. “Are you going to tell Tony?”
“Tell Tony what?”
“About…” Happy scratches the back of his neck. “You know…” His eyes slide to the windowsill, and Pepper follows his gaze. On the counter behind the sink is a bottle of prenatal vitamins—a store-brand bottle of thick yellow pills. “Have you told him already?”
Something inside of Pepper hardens like quick-drying concrete. Sure, it must be obvious now. At four months, she is showing a little, but she thought she was doing a good job hiding it with loose blouses and well-placed jackets. “As long as he’s staying in that lab,” says Pepper coldly, “he doesn’t get to know a thing.”
Happy grimaces again. He doesn’t say anything in response; he simply asks her if she needs anything else before leaving. She picks up her paperwork again: it’s nothing too complicated, just papers to re-purchase Stark Tower. It’s currently owned by Amazon, but they only sold it a couple years ago. In this paperwork is a clause to re-purchase the property; after she finds it, she plans to move everything back to the Tower.She’s sure Peter won’t mind the move. Happy and the other board members won’t mind, either.
Pepper’s just…tired of being here. She’s tired of waiting for Tony to come out of the laboratory. She’s tired of waiting for FRIDAY to come back to life and talk to her over the PA system. She’s tired of being reminded of what happened every time she wakes up and every time she walks out of the house. She’s tired of him having this hold over her.
If Tony wants to stay in the lab, he can stay.
But she’s going to move.
THURSDAY, JUNE 21 — 12:12 PM
Before he even thinks about disturbing Peter’s friends, Happy goes to Tony.
He gets to the laboratory doors, still encased in sheets of steel, and he knocks lightly. “Hey, Tony,” he says, before anything else. He’s come here before, begged him to come out or yelled at him to complete some work and cursed at him for what he did to Pepper—all to nothing but faceless steel. “I know you’re going through…a thing , but I thought you oughta know… Pepper needs you, man. She really needs you. I don’t know if she even gets how much she needs you.” He rubs at his face—he hasn’t shaven in a while, so his beard is getting a little long. “She’s like you, Tony. She won’t ask for help. She won’t give in. She’ll just bury and bury until it kills her.”
Silence from the lab.
“She’s not invincible, Tony. She doesn’t want to do this without you, but she will. She…” He looks around. In front of this door—he remembers the meals that Pepper put in front of the door, the decaf coffees. He can still spot splashes or coffee staining the steel, now sticky and blackened from time. She must’ve thrown it at the place. “She’s pregnant.”
He wonders if Tony already knows. He could be—that lab is the home base for FRIDAY, so if he rebooted the AI correctly, he could have access to every part of the Stark Industries campus from inside that place. He’s seen Tony do crazier. “She decided to keep it—we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet. they’ve done all the tests they can do so far—the baby’s healthy. It’s all we could ask for, right?”
Happy straightens his tie, and he faces the lab doors head-on. “Tony, look. I get it. We all have our moments. You want to…escape. But now's not the time. She needs you. We all need you.”
If telling him about Pepper didn’t make him come out of that place, then what would?
It’s surprisingly easy for Happy Hogan to gain entrance to Peter’s school.
The Midtown School of Science and Technology, while having award-winning laboratories and nationally ranked decathlon teams, does not have excellent security. Perhaps it’s because Happy is the head of security at Stark Industries, or because he’d been there before, or because it was the last day of school, but Happy managed to get inside just by claiming he wanted to talk to students about prospective internships.
He’s contacted both Edward Leeds and Michelle Jones-Watson, but gotten no responses from either, so he asks the principal to page them both. The vice principal is on maternity leave, so he remains in her office and waits for the kids to show up.
When the girl first shows, she’s dressed in black and white—a white tee displaying a sketch graphic of Joan of Arc, near-black corduroys, and a matching blazer with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She doesn’t close the door behind her, and she doesn’t sit down. Michelle’s hair is messy and curly, side bangs drifting down her left cheek. Hands in her pockets, glare prominent, she says, “I know I didn’t apply for any internships at Stark Industries, so who the hell are you?”
Happy clears his throat. “Um, Ms. Jones-Watson, it’s nice to meet you—”
“Did something happen? Is my family okay?”
He can barely get a word out. “No, nothing—look, everything’s fine. Your family’s fine, everyone’s good.”
“So you just break in to high schools for fun?”
He blinks. This girl’s got audacity. He’s seen her a couple times from afar when he picked up Peter from school, but never had a conversation with the girl. “No, I’m not—no one’s breaking in. I just need to talk to you. I’m Peter’s, uh” —What is he supposed to say? Caretaker? Occasional chauffeur? Babysitter? Bodyguard?— “supervisor at Stark Industries.”
Michelle folds her arms. After a pause, she demands, “Lemme see your ID.” Happy doesn’t hesitate; he needs the girl to trust him. He hands over his ID card, where it reads plainly: HAPPY HOGAN, HEAD OF SECURITY. “Hm,” says the girl, as she hands it back. “I thought Peter worked directly under Tony Stark.”
“He does, he does—just, I also help…with other stuff—look, it’s not important. This is about Peter.” MJ kicks back at the door, and it slowly squeaks closed. “We’ve been trying to get in contact with him about” —Where the hell has he been? If he’s okay?— “future opportunities for his internship, but his current phone number goes unresponsive.”
“I know,” she says stiltedly. Her arms are still folded, and a small wrinkle forms between her eyebrows.
“Well, you are one of his emergency contacts, so—”
“So you think something happened to him?”
“No, no, no,” Happy says, a little too quickly. “Just following protocol. If we can’t get ahold of one of our interns, we get in touch with their emergency contacts.”
Her hands drop a little. “I’m his emergency contact?” she says, and she shakes off her softening face to glare at him further. “Who else?”
“Well, his guardian, May Parker, but she went with him, so I’ve been trying to get ahold of your friend, too. Edward Leeds?”
“Ned,” she corrects. “He skipped school today. Been doing that a lot.”
Happy never thought of Peter’s friends as the ‘skipping school’ type. Particularly Ned. “Well, do you think you could get him for me? I’d like to talk to him, too.”
She sniffs. “Sure. But I can tell you one thing for sure: he probably won’t say a word to you.”
Oh. Without a hint about a way to contact the Spider-Kid, he’s left with nothing but dead ends. “You sure?”
“Yeah, but I can tell you where to find him.”