all the things i've seen
FRIDAY, JULY 27 — 7:20 PM
Tony can’t help the tears streaming down his face. “Wait,” he gasps into the phone. “ Wait .”
On the television, Peter is shaking. Charlie’s got the muzzle of a gun pressed to his chin and he’s crying. “Tell him, Parker,” he snaps.
His kid is sobbing, and blood slides from Peter’s nose into his mouth. “You have to,” he sobs, “You have to finish the—have to finish—”
Charlie slams the gun against his head and the kid goes limp; the addict turns and faces the camera. “You getting used to this, Stark? You like watching your kid bleed?”
“No,” Tony chokes out. “No, of course not—“
“THEN WHY ARENT YOU FUCKING FINISHED YET??”
“I’m trying,” he cries, “I'm trying, I’m doing my best, what you want isn’t easy, I’m so close—“
“—THEN FINISH ALREADY!”
“I'm trying, I'm working as fast as I can!”
“I'm sending Riri for your next prototype in two days. TWO DAYS, YOU HEAR ME?? AND IT BETTER WORK!”
Tony’s nodding like a bobblehead, the whole time his eyes trained on the unconscious Peter, who’s starting to stir awake. “Yes, yes, of course, this one’ll—it’ll be much better—”
At Charlie’s command, a man beside Peter socks him in the chest; Peter doubles over in the chair.
FRIDAY, JULY 27 — 9:44 PM
His injuries aren’t bad today: a gash in his forehead, scattered bruises over his torso, a quickly-darkening black eye, and another break in his crooked nose. The head’s the worst part—it still rings, and he has trouble understanding Cassie when she talks to him, asking if he’s okay. “I’m good,” he says, before swaying and falling into the wall. His lip’s bleeding, too—when did that happen?
The little girl helps him onto their concrete slab of a bed, letting him lean on her for support as he staggers a couple feet and collapses onto the bed. He’s scrubbed clean, the laceration in his forehead stitched up nicely by the doctor, the bruises smeared with ointment, but it doesn’t change the fact that he still hurts. “Anyone come in here while I was gone?” he asks.
“Nobody,” she says.
Peter nods—and immediately regrets the motion, because it forces a wave of nausea through his stomach that drags up into his throat. “Good.”
That only remains true for another few minutes before they hear footsteps coming to their door. The footsteps are light and confident—Beck’s—and immediately followed by a man’s light humming. “Iron Man,” says Peter sharply, and he struggles to push himself off the bed.
Instead of going under the bed like he just told her to, Cassie looks at him, a smile creeping onto her face. “Is that Mr. Beck?” she asks, perking up.
There’s a sudden twist in Peter’s gut, like the twist of a serrated knife. “Get under the bed,” he snaps, sounding more like a soldier than a companion, and she scampers beneath the bed to her usual spot.
Peter can’t gather the energy to push himself off the bed; he imagines the impact of falling, the pain that will surely reverberate through his body once he hits the ground, and can’t make himself move. He grabs the bed-railing and barely starts to push himself to the ground when there’s the sound of a key in their cell door.
When the door opens, it’s Quentin Beck. He’s dressed in a Cornell sweatshirt and a pair of loose jeans, and his hands are dirty—maybe from working on the weapon. He smiles. “Peter Parker,” he says, and Peter feels his whole body freeze up. He feels suddenly gray and wan, like an age-faded painting or an overwound rubber band or a book left out in the rain.
Beck closes the space between them in seconds; Peter scrambles back, but Beck gets a hand on his leg and squeezes his knee with a vice-grip, five fingers strong enough around his broken kneecap that Peter cries out in pain. There’s hands on him, and he gasps, a primitive noise—
Peter finds himself flat on his back, and a familiar panic floods him like a bucket of ice water. There’s a weight on top of him—a man’s knees pinning his thighs to the bed, a man’s hand pinning both his wrists above his head, a man’s sturdy torso leaned above him. At once, he forgets where he is, and he feels like something vivisected: a fly or a frog or a fetal pig pinned to an aluminum tray. “Wait, wait, wait—”
Beck’s kneeling on him.
The panic tangles around him like a bloodstained bedsheet; Peter thrashes, trying to twist away from Beck, but his knees and calves drive a massive pressure on Peter’s thighs, too heavy to throw off; the man only thrusts his hand into Peter’s chin until he’s got his whole chin grasped tightly in his thick fingers.
Peter can’t move . He’s helpless, left to heave each breath through fear-speckled lungs; Beck’s knees are on his thighs. Beck’s knees are on his thighs . He tries to say something, but the man’s fingers pinch the skin of his chin and he loses all ability to speak.
Beck’s fingers are on his face now, pressing and caressing, prodding at each bone and each freckle, spreading each fingertip over the bruised skin of his face like he’s searching for the perfect peach in the fruit aisle. The man laughs—something dark and lusty—and Peter’s legs go prickly and numb. “ God , you’re so fucking—“ There’s a noise from the back of his throat. He leans forward, pressing Peter’s chin up to bare his throat, and inhales deeply at Peter’s neck, the heat of his breath thick with cigarette smoke as he exhales. “How old are you? Fifteen? Sixteen?”
Peter's mind becomes something blank and poreless. He keeps thinking: eight, eight, eight. I'm eight years old.
Fingers slip down to his throat; thumbs press into his windpipe; sweat-soaked horror alights in his chest. “I said,” repeats Beck, “how old are you?”
“Seventeen,” says Peter, and his voice sounds half a world away.
“Hm,” says the man, and he smells like sweat. “Thought you were jailbait with that face…” Dipping his face into the crook of Peter’s neck, he takes another deep inhale. “And you smell fucking delicious . Did you wash like I told you to?”
Above him, Beck suddenly looks ten sizes too big, and Peter feels ten sizes too small; he’s Alice in Wonderland, and Beck’s face is all he can see. Espresso-brown eyes. Bearded chin. Tawny hair. White teeth.
“Say yes, Peter.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Everywhere?”
Peter’s face goes slack.
Beck laughs again. “No harm in being clean, hm, Petey?” He keeps touching and touching: his face, his hair, his neck. Peter feels ghastly; he feels see-through. Like the hand on him isn’t Beck’s. Like this room is floating through space instead of rooted underground. “I should tell Keene to leave your face,” he says with that dark-brown gaze. “Don’t get me wrong, I like my meat a little rare, a little tender, but—you’ve got that sweet face . Hate to see it all marked up like this.” He traces the scars on Peter's face with his thumb: a knife that stabbed through the flesh of his cheek, a ring that split his lip with a punch, a steel-toed boot that caught the side of his head, a blowtorch that melted his mess of an ear.
It takes Peter too fucking long to realize that the man’s thumb has undone the top button of his jumpsuit, exposing a peek of his collarbone. “You’re a good boy, Petey,” he says lowly. “So I brought you something.” He nods back towards the door; there, another bag sits. It’s a white plastic grocery bag—maybe from a gas station or a minimart. It reads in bright red lettering: THANK YOU.
His stomach growls.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Beck says, waggling his forefinger like a kindergarten teacher. “I’m not Santa Claus, am I?” He glances down towards Cassie, to her hiding spot under the bed, and he gives a little smile. Peter wants to peel the skin off his eyes for even looking at her. “I gave you something yesterday, didn’t I? Now, you gotta give me something. That’s the way the world works: you give and you get, right?”
Peter’s grinding his teeth. He says, through his teeth, “I don't have anything to give you.”
Beck smiles. “Of course you do.” His teeth are very, very white.
Peter hears the words before the man says them: Give me a kiss .
No, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. No, no, no, no …
“Come on, sweetheart,” he says. “I don’t bite.”
“I don’t—” he starts, but his chest feels like it’s filling with liquid nitrogen, unbearably cold. “I don’t…”
A dark laugh. “Is that a no?” Beck laughs again, and his knees press, heavy, into Peter’s thighs. “Who are you to say no to me, Petey Parker? Hm?”
His heartbeat pulses in his ears—Beck’s fingernail digs into his jaw, enough for a slight pinch.
“What are your options here, hm? Who you gonna fuck? Sweet little Riri? Charlie? I’m your best option and you fucking know it. Kiss me.”
Peter shakes his head, but Beck squeezes hard, his thick hand forcing his skull down into the concrete bed until he stops moving.
“Say okay, Peter,” he says, with a hot breath in his ear, “Say it.”
FRIDAY, JULY 27 — 9:56 PM
Riri laces up her pink Converse.
She’s got to go on another supplies run. She’ll drive alone—most of the others are too high to chaperone. She’ll go to the local food pantry first to stock up on canned goods, then to the post office to pick up any of Secretary Ross’ packages—mostly chemicals and weapons parts that Stark needs—and then at last to Stark’s lab to drop off the items.
Peter Parker’s been doing better with the new food supplies. He’s definitely started healing faster, but for some reason he doesn’t act like he’s improving. He’ll go completely silent during torture—he’ll flinch at nothing. According to the good doctor, Parker occasionally refuses treatment, screaming at the doc not to touch him.
On the other hand, Cassie hasn’t improved much. She still coughs in her sleep and sleeps all the time. Riri supposes that malnutrition can’t be cured overnight.
Picking up her backpack, Riri strides down the hallway, where she finds—for the umpteenth time—that the door to the kids’ cell is unlocked. Fucking Beck. She can hear him talking in that low voice. He sounds “...want the food or don’t you? Say it. Say okay.”
“That—I don’t—that wasn’t—” His voice edges up suddenly into a crazed whine. “ W-wait, wait, please —”
Pulling out her pistol, she nudges at the door with her shoe, and when it opens, she finds the brown-haired man on top of Peter on the bed—as well as Cassie beneath the bed, eyes squeezed shut and hands over her ears. His teeth are bared and his eyes are dark and the muscles in his arms are flexed—everything about him screams predator . He’s got one hand pinning down Peter’s arms, and the other—Beck’s got half his arm down the unbuttoned front of Peter’s jumpsuit. Far enough to be touching him.
That expression written all over Peter’s face—that freaked-out, paralysed, deer-in-headlights, bear-in-a-trap look—is so familiar. He usually only looks like that when he’s in the Chair. “Beck!” she barks, and the brown-haired man jumps up like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “We’re not supposed to be in here.”
Sheepish, the man hops down from the bed and wipes his hands on his jeans. “My bad,” he says, and he fixes the sleeves of his sweatshirt like his hand wasn’t just in Peter’s pants. He strides past her through the doorway, and Riri just stands there, still. Now that the man’s gone, Peter clutching the open buttons of his jumpsuit closed with his bone-thin fingers, shaking lightly as though he’s cold, gulping great, heaving breaths into his bruise-spattered chest.
Riri doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to think it. “Is he…”
“Is he what ?” snaps Peter, bitterly.
The moment spoils between them, unpleasantly sour. “Nevermind,” she says, squeaking her converse against their concrete floor. She puts her pistol back into the waistband of her jeans.“I’m, um. I’m going to the food pantry, and then to Stark’s. Is there anything you, uh, want?”
The sound of Cassie coughing beneath the bed. Peter is still rooted in his spot like a marble statue, legs together, arms wrapped around himself. He looks up, finally, to meet her eyes, and he scans her face. Riri finds it almost funny—they both have the same crook to their nose, both from Charlie’s fist. “What?” he says. His voice is echoey and weird, like a ghost.
“Like,” she echoes, “to eat?”
The battered boy only stares at her.
“Only canned stuff—but I’ll look for it, if you want.” Feeling the heat of his continued stare, she ducks, staring at the ground. “Nevermind,” she says again.
As she turns to leave, she hears suddenly: “Pumpkin.”
She turns back around, her dirty Converse squeaking against the floor. “Like, chopped up?”
Peter shakes his head slightly, winding the top half of his jumpsuit tighter around himself. “Like for pie,” he says quietly.
“Oh,” she says. She remembers those orange cans from when she was little with her brother: mixing sugar and cinnamon and ginger in a bowl, beating the eggs, dumping in the deliciously orange pumpkin, stirring in cans of evaporated milk, spilling it all over the pie shell… “Okay. Yeah, sure.”
As she leaves, she hears them: some shuffling and then the kids are whispering. A shaky voice: “No, Cass, stay there.”
“But he brought—”
“Stay. There.”
FRIDAY, JULY 27 — 11:38 PM
Happy enters her house late Friday night waving a literal video cassette in his hand. “I did it,” he says. “No Internet, no paper trail, no tech trail. Bribed the camera-people with Superbowl tickets—and voila!”
He puts in the cassette to the TV—Tony always left it hooked up to their television, even though the rest of their house was usually so high-tech—and the video plays. It’s a simple one: a grainy black-and-white image of an empty suburban road. It’s windy, and the onscreen trees rustle with each breeze. There’s no sound.
“They said the collision happened around 7:42PM,” says Happy. He points at the screen: a digital clock reading 7:36PM.
Empty road. A couple cars pass, and then a few more, and then the road is empty again. 7:37. 7:38. 7:39. A few cars pass. 7:40. 7:41.
Finally: 7:42 PM.
Beside her, Happy winces as a truck barrels from across empty grass to collide with the Parkers’ faded-blue sedan so hard that the car flips over, rolling over asphalt until it comes to a shattered halt on the grassy roadside. A fleeting thought: he’s dead . With that kind of crash, it’s no wonder May Parker was left in such a horrific state.
There’s a swarm of dark-clothed men from the truck, all completely unharmed from the crash, and they pull the passenger from his upside-down seat. He starts fighting immediately, punching and kicking and whirling. Pepper feels a sudden swell of pride for the kid. It’s definitely him. He doesn’t have his web shooters, but he’s still fighting like Spiderman, flipping and twisting between his attackers like a true superhero.
The fight is quick; in only a few moments, Peter is down, dragged limp back to the truck before they drive off.
By the time the truck vanishes from the screen, the clock only reads 7:53 PM. Peter Parker’s entire kidnapping only took eleven minutes. Eleven minutes. Eleven minutes and the rest of his junior year went down the drain. How could she not have noticed? All of this—the day before Tony locked himself into his lab. How could she have been so blind.
Happy clears his throat. He’s paused the video. “They found May in the car a little after ten. I was wondering how they didn’t know it was her, but see” —he taps the screen with the empty street— “the car wasn’t registered to May or Peter.”
Pepper blinks. “That’s their car, though.” That beat-up ‘98 Volkswagen Jetta has been Peter’s ride for as long as she’s known him.
Happy shakes his head. “That license plate isn’t registered to the Parkers. It’s registered to the kid’s mom.”
Pepper doesn’t even remember the woman’s name. She knows that the Peter’s parents died in a plane crash when he was just six years old, but she’s never heard the kid talk about it.
“And not after she got married—she got it before, so it’s registered to the name Mary Fitzpatrick.”
With a name detached from both Peter Parker and May Parker, it makes sense that no one would know that the car that crashed belonged to the Parkers. “They knew,” says Pepper suddenly. “They must’ve known that the car wouldn’t be traced back to Peter and May.”
“Because if the world found out they’d kidnapped Peter Parker…” starts Happy.
“...then the world would know why Tony locked himself in his lab,” finishes Pepper. Everyone knew that Peter Parker was Tony Stark’s intern. It was how they kept the whole Spider-man thing under wraps. Tony’s life was so much in the public eye that there was no other way to disguise why the kid was at Stark Industries all the time. “Makes sense. Did you look up the truck, too?”
Happy shook his head. “No plates, front or back, that the video could catch. I tried to follow them on nearby red light cameras but…” He shrugs helplessly. “It’s a Ford Ranger—way too common—and they must’ve added plates somewhere nearby. I’ve got no clue where they went.”
Damn it. How are they supposed to find this kid if they can’t even find where he went? He could be outside the city—outside the state—outside the country for all they know.
“But… I did find what you asked me for.” He rifles through his pants pocket and pulls out a flash drive. “It’s JARVIS—Tony’s code from 2015, right before we sold the Tower. It’s never even seen this place before.”
They plug in Jarvis to Happy’s laptop first. Almost right say, a black-and-blue interface emerges onto the screen, asking for a series of security questions. Happy squints at the screen. “Mother’s maiden name? First pet? Best sandwich?”
Pepper slides the laptop to her side of the table. “I’ve got it.” It’s a series of questions so long that it feels more like a standardized test than a set of passwords, but they’re all questions about Tony. Questions, obviously, that she knows the answers to. “Done,” she says, as JARVIS crackles to life.
His familiar British tone emerges over the computer’s tinny speakers. “User recognized: Welcome, Anthony Edward Stark.” Onscreen, there are no buttons or key-shortcuts, only a blank black screen with a neon blue line transmitting the audio frequency of JARVIS’ voice. The little camera indicator at the top of Happy’s laptop blinks green. “Scanning users. Welcome, Virginia Elizabeth Potts. Welcome, Harold Joseph Hogan.”
“Elizabeth?” echoes Happy. “I thought it was—“
“Pepper’s just a nickname,” she explains quickly. “Tony gave it to me, actually. The day we met.”
“Oh,” he says. “I feel like I should've known that.”
Pepper shrugs half-heartedly, JARVIS speaks again. “Location: unidentified address near Verona Beach, New York. Systems limited to one 2015 MacBook Pro. How can I help?”
“We need you to hack into Tony’s lab,” she says. “Undetected. Could you do that?”
“Of course, Ms. Potts.”
SATURDAY, JULY 28 — 4:51 AM
Peter wakes to a low voice in their cell.
“...looked up at the sky, and a huge motorcycle fell out of the air and landed on the road in front of them. If the motorcycle was huge, it was nothing to the man sitting astride it. He was almost twice as tall as a normal man and at least five times as wide…”
Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong . He takes a breath, and dread like a rattlesnake coils around his chest. It smells like cigarette smoke .
Peter’s eyes fly open; he flies up into a sitting position, turns his head and finds, settled by the wall: Quentin Beck.
The mere sight of him makes Peter’s whole body go cold.
Peter’s wide awake now.
Beck’s holding a book open in one hand and has his other on Cassie’s shoulder. Cassie’s leaning against him as he reads, cheek pressed against his arm, perfectly content. “…Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall bent forward over the bundle of blankets. Inside, just visible, was a baby boy, fast asleep. Under a tuft of jet-black hair over his forehead they could see a curiously shaped cut, like a bolt of lightning…”
Peter feels like he’s going to pass out—every bit of air has been vacuumed clean from him, like he’s been shrink-wrapped like a college duvet or air-dried like a preserved flower. He can’t find the words, every drop of blood is sucked clean of him in that moment, because he goes so still that his vision goes spotty and white. He tries saying her name, but it just comes out as a mumble. A barely-there puff of air.
As if on cue, Beck looks up at him mid-sentence and smiles. “Oh, Peter,” he says with a sickly sweet tone, “you’re finally up!” Folding over the page with a smooth, diagonal crease, he dog-ears the page he’s holding but doesn’t shut the book. His hands are white and clean, and there’s hair on his knuckles. “What a pleasant surprise! I was just reading with little Miss Cassie here.”
Peter can’t move. He can’t talk. He can’t breathe . Frozen, he just sits on the bed, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. All the while, Cassie leans against Beck’s arm like he’s her dad, completely oblivious to the high-pitched whine in Peter’s ears, the coppery blood pumping in Peter’s face, the trembly weakness in his thighs.
Beck looks at Peter and gives him a nearly imperceptible smirk. “She does make such great company,” the brown-haired man says, “don’t you think?”
Peter feels faint. Like he’s strung up by his ankles and all the blood is rushing to his head. He tries, again, to warn her but he can’t make the words come out. He just keeps seeing the ceiling of his childhood bedroom—the stipple ceiling and the glow-in-the-dark planets—swim before his eyes.
Cassie turns her face into Beck’s arm, her oily hair tickling his forearm, and says, “Can we keep reading, Mr. Beck?”
He’s too close to her. His hands— where the fuck are his hands— squeeze the book shut and tap the cover with his fingernails. “Of course, sweetheart. But first, you want your present, don’t you? For being such a good girl?”
Peter’s gonna throw up. Good boy , he hears, in a nauseating vocal meld of Skip’s and Beck’s. Phantom sensation on his thigh—like fingers, like thumbs—and he flinches, looking down to find nothing but cloth on his leg.
“Yes!” says Cassie with a beaming face. “More pop-tarts!”
“That’s right,” says Beck, fishing through his plastic grocery bag. “Here you go, sweetheart.”
Cassie looks so happy . She tears into the pop-tart like a wild animal, smashing the whole thing into her mouth in one gok, then the next one, cupping her hands over her mouth to catch any crumbs. When she’s done, she licks her hands clean and then the wrapper, too.
“Cassie,” he manages, in a throaty whisper, and Beck gives him such a cold stare that he loses his voice completely.
“Peter, look!” she says. “He brought you one, too!”
Peter can’t feel his face.
Beck stands, then, handing Cassie the book. She happily opens it, flipping to the page they left off on, and starts to read again. The brown-haired man moves towards him and all of a sudden Peter can feel his hands on him, those thick fingers snaking into his pants, gripping him so tight it hurt, those fingers, those fingers on him —
Beck’s face-to-face with him, standing above him. He tilts his head, and his gaze is like an electrolaser. “Peter,” he says, “you still owe me something, don’t you?”
No. No, no, no, no.
“Stand up,” the man says.
Peter finds himself on his feet; there’s a sweaty hand on the back of his neck.
“Now, I don’t want her,” he says. “I want you. But refuse me again, and I’ll make do with her, you understand me?”
Peter’s blood has turned to some kind of noxious sludge.
“Say yes, Peter.”
His voice comes out in a petrified gasp: “Yes.”
“So the next time,” the man continues, in a voice like a smoking gun, “that I ask you for something, you’re gonna give it to me, understand?”
The hand on his neck gets tighter. Four fingers curling around his windpipe and a thumb pressing into the base of his skull. “Say yes,” says Beck, low and firm.
“Yes,” he chokes out.
“Good,” he says. “Now, let’s try this again, Petey. Give me a kiss.”
Peter does it.
Beck licks his lips. “Eh. Try again. I wanna really feel it.”
He does it again.
Beck smiles and smiles. “Good boy,” he says, and he tosses the pop-tart onto the bed. He smiles at Cassie as he goes, giving her a pat on the head, and she beams.
Peter can’t move.
“See you around, Petey.”
SATURDAY, JULY 28 — 5:06 AM
When Mr. Beck leaves, Peter sits in front of the door with his ear pressed to the vibranium fixings. He sits and he sits and he sits. Whenever Cassie tries to say something, he shushes her and keeps sitting by the door. He’s not being quiet to be mean; he’s listening to the doors open and close.
Cassie’s not smart enough or old enough yet to know how to do that—but Peter can do it. He picks out people’s footsteps and their voices from hints of sound all the way down the hallway.
He waits. They both wait.
They wait and they wait until Cassie so gets horrendously bored just sitting there with him that she starts daydreaming about being home. She daydreams and Peter listens and she daydreams some more. Cassie wishes she had the book that Mr. Beck gave her, but Peter’s got it clenched in his hand and won’t let her have it.
They wait. They keep waiting. They wait and listen and wait unless until finally there’s Mr. Beck’s laughing voice and a door slam. He’s left the bunker.
As soon as they hear the second door—the lid to the bunker opening and shutting—Peter whips around, and with his voice as sharp as a needle, snaps, “What did I tell you?”
He’s loud. He’s mad . “Wh-what?”
He’s standing now, pacing back and forth, limping so heavily that his foot barely touches the ground. “What did I tell you about him, Cassie ?”
There’s a bad feeling in Cassie’s stomach. “You said—you said not to—not to talk to him—but he said he’d give me a pop-tart—”
He’s got his hands on his head, pulling at his hair. “Oh, God,” he says. “Oh, God—oh, my God, I can’t—” He’s shutting and opening his eyes, and then he’s slapping at his forehead. “I told you not to fucking talk to him!”
She can’t help it—she starts blubbering, and her words don’t come out right. “But he’s nice—he’s like—like Ava—the pop-tarts—he gave me a book—”
“Did he touch you? Did he touch you? ”
Cassie wants her book back. “No, no, he just read to me—I liked when he read to me—he’s nice to me—” She’s so confused. She likes Mr. Beck. She likes that he brings them pop-tarts and that he’s nice to Peter and that he gave her a book to read. He’s nicer than all the rest of them and he doesn’t hurt them, either. He’s better than Charlie and Renee and all the others. He’s good. He’s nice . Life’s better when Mr. Beck’s around. “He said he’s my friend,” she insists. “He’s my—”
“Stop it!” snarls Peter, and Cassie flinches so hard she bumps her head on the cell door. “I told you how many fucking times, Cass!”
“A lot,” she says, Beck’s nice; why is Peter so mad about this? He’s so nice to Peter—and sure, he smells like smoke and he says weird things sometimes—but he doesn’t hurt them. He makes sure they’re fed; for the first time since she arrived here, she fell asleep with her belly mostly full. Whenever Mr. Beck comes to visit, her stomach doesn’t growl like a bengal tiger. Why doesn’t Peter like him like she does? “But he said—”
“I don’t fucking care what he said, Cass! I told you—God, I told you not to! ”
Now she feels bad again, really bad, and tears are bubbling to her eyes. “B-but, b-but—”
Peter’s eyes look like dark, angry pools of oil. “I told you! You don’t go near him! You don’t talk to him, you don’t touch him, you don’t do anything and what did you do? ” He slams his hand into the wall—the wall cracks, and Peter's hand cracks with it; he groans with the pain of the first impact, winds up, and then smashes his hand into it again. “God damn it!”
She’s scared; Peter's hand looks like a crumpled piece of paper. “He—he—he’s my friend—” she hiccups, trying to get her words out between each sob.
He turns on her. “He’s not your friend! He’s not your friend!”
Peter’s never mad at her. Peter’s never mad at her.
Cassie doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand why Peter doesn’t like him so much—why he ducks his head every time Beck enters the cell, why he shrinks away from every caress, why he hesitates in taking every gift. Mr. Beck’s nice.
“I don’t just make up these rules for no fucking reason! I make them to keep you safe— to keep us safe! This isn’t a fucking playground, Cassie! You can’t—” He scrubs his hand down his face and then slaps at his cheeks. “We’re not in kindergarten class! You can’t just disobey the rules just because you feel like it! ” He’s shaking—he’s gone pale and trembly. “ God — fucking—damn it!” And then he screams —straight at the wall, he screams—and he slams his hand into the wall for a third time.
And now Cassie's bawling. She’s sad—she’s scared—she’s mad—she’s every bad feeling rolled into one. She’s crying and crying and Peter’s still yelling, loud and angry. She’s crying so hard that she can taste salty mucus run into her mouth, and she’s swallowing and hiccuping and wailing. All she can feel is this thing she doesn’t have a name for. She feels like she’s five years old or four or three because now she’s been bawling for so long that she’s forgotten the reason why, just that it’ll make her feel better. Cassie’s crying so hard that it comes out of her in heaves, in great retches of the trenches of her lungs, huge breaths of gaping wideness that fill her completely before they’re sucked away by her upset.
Peter picks up the book from the ground, shaking it and the pages at her.“This? This? This fucking thing! I told you not to take anything from him!”
She’s crying so hard that she can’t see him through the waves of quivering water in her eyes. “P-Pe-Pe—” she tries, but she’s sobbing too miserably to get a single word out.
“God!” He storms, book in hand, to the corner of the cell where their toilet is. She follows him, still crying, and tugs at his pants leg; he shakes her off, and he half-falls on the ground, pinning down the book with his knee and ripping out pages with his not-broken hand. “You don’t want this! You don’t fucking want this!”
“No!” she shrieks, sobbing, and she throws herself at Peter’s feet. “No—no— my book! ”
Pages—and pages—and pages. He keeps ripping them out and throwing them into the toilet. “This is what happens when you don’t listen to me! Okay? Bad things happen when you don’t listen!”
For a second, Cassie wishes that one of the bad people, one of Charlie’s people, would come in and take Peter away. That they’d come and take him to that other room where he screams so that she could hide under the bed because she doesn’t want Peter here anymore. She doesn’t want him to yell at her anymore. She wants to be alone—she wants her book—she wants Beck to come read to her—she wants her mommy and her daddy and Jim—she wants Peter to hug her and tell her everything’s okay—she wants to go home— she wants it all to stop . “Stop, stop, stop!” she screams, and she throws herself over the open mouth of the toilet so that Peter can’t throw anything else in there. Hugging the dirty toilet-seat, she keeps crying, hiccuping and hugging it tight and she hopes that Peter doesn’t hit her.
The hit never comes; instead, the ripping sounds stop. The silence is filled with the sounds of sobbing—wet, gaspy sobbing like she’s doing. When she turns around, she sees Peter: he’s on his hands and knees over the half-remains of that brown book, crying. “Oh, God—” he manages, and he falls into a weird sitting position, kind of leaned up against the bed-railing. “Oh, God, oh, God.”
Tears spill down her face. “I’m—I’m sorry,” she cries, and there’s so much water coming down her face that there are tears running down her neck. ““I’ll—listen—I’ll be good—I’m sorry!”
He’s crying, too. “I’m sorry,” he says, echoing her. He opens his arms wide, and he kicks away the book with his good leg. “I’m sorry, come here, Cassie, come here. I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”
She throws herself into Peter’s open arms, and he hugs her as she cries, cradling her as she sobs incoherently into his shoulder. “I don’t—” she hiccups. “I don’t—like—when—you yell—”
“I know,” says Peter, and he hugs her tight. She can feel him crying into her hair. “I’m sorry, Cassie… I know, I’m sorry.”
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1 — 12:26 PM
Agent Jimmy Woo gets a call from that secretary—Kate Bishop—while he’s on his lunch break. “I don’t have much for you,” says the girl, “but at least it’s something.”
“Anything will help,” says Jimmy.
“Well, there’s only one person who’s not in jail or witness protection who could maybe give you access to the HYDRA bunkers, and you’re not gonna like it. He’s, like, famous.”
Jimmy frowns. “Who?”
“James Buchanan Barnes. The Winter Soldier.”