don't be a stranger
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 — 7:39 PM
Tony can feel Peter’s stare like a pair of lasers in his face, a look so intense that it’s melting him down to the bone.
He just said his name.
Tony’s name and nothing else.
It’s the first true point of coherency Peter’s had since he arrived, and thank God he’s not thrashing anymore.
“Yes,” Tony chokes out. “Yeah, kid, it’s me. It’s Mr. Stark.”
Wide-eyed and still protecting the little girl, Peter continues to stare. Tears run from his face, mucus streams from his nose, and there’s blood in his teeth—why the hell is there blood in his teeth?
Peter’s so hesitant. So timid. Like any move he makes will set Tony on a rampage. This isn’t the Peter Parker he used to know—who talked until he was out of breath, whose face lit up at the slightest Star Wars reference, who chattered nonstop through every meal, who spotted crime from his bedroom window and swung down to lend a helping hand… Terrified confusion washes over the boy’s gaunt face, his brown eyes tracking Tony’s movements as he shifts onto his knees.
Behind him is a sudden stillness—Happy must have cleared out most of the people in the stairwell.
And Peter stares.
He doesn’t rush at him for an embrace or cower away in terror or shake a pointed finger at him with rage.
He just…stares.
He holds that crying little girl and stares—those brown eyes squint, trying to narrow down what he’s seeing, so Tony repeats himself. “It’s me, buddy,” he says. “Do you know where you are?”
He doesn’t say anything—the little girl, Cassie Paxton, whispers into Peter’s good ear. The kid doesn’t make a move to know he’s heard her—he continues to stare at Tony like he’s never seen another human being in his life.
“You’re at a hospital,” Tony says, painstakingly slow, his heart pounding for the kid, “in northern New Hampshire.” The kid’s eyes jerk around the room, scanning and scanning but not really seeing. “You’re… You were in the ICU—and now you’re in a stairwell. We’re safe—you’re not there anymore. You’re safe.”
The expression of unadulterated confusion on his face twists into something raw and shining—the kid squeezes his eyes shut. His hands tremble again, and he clamps them around the little girl. He’s so thin; a breeze could take him out. God, Tony’s gonna feed this kid. They’ve—they’ve been starving him for so long… Tony’s gonna fill his fridge with anything and everything this kid has ever fucking wanted. Thai food. Pasta. Burgers. Chinese. Pizza. Anything he wants.
He looks so much worse in person than he ever did on that grainy television. He can see the remnants of every cut they sliced into his skin, can see every scared twitch in his body. He’s terrified.
And why wouldn’t he be? He just spent the last four and half months being tortured and belittled by those sick psychopaths.
“They arrested everyone in there,” Tony continues. “Everyone, buddy. Avengers fucking swarmed the place—you remember that? You’re never going back in there.”
He moves his already-extended hand towards Peter—craving to touch him, to hold him, to soothe him like he’s wanted to these past few months—and the kid flinches, his whole body going rigid and his eyes going wide. “Mr. Stark,” Peter whimpers— his name again, but it’s half-begging and half-fearing.
The kid doesn’t know what to do.
“You’re at a hospital,” he repeats, the words coming out so fast. “You’re safe, Pete. We got you out.” Again, he shifts closer, his feet barely sliding over the hospital tile. He approaches him slowly, like one would a stray dog or a spooked horse. “It’s me, kid. It’s me. I’m not gonna hurt you.” Tony keeps his hand extended, palm out. “It’s just me.” His fingers tremble, his nerves still frayed from the supplement pills.
There’s sudden movement behind Tony—the instant it happens, Peter’s eyes flit to it, and he curls into the wall, pulling his bandaged body around the little girl with a full-bodied violence.
Peter’s eyes cloud with fear at the sudden motion—a physical sheen like a cataract—and he sucks in a breath of air; his bare chest shudders with each intake. The pain he’s in is so obvious: his chest so taut, his breathing so hitched, his jaw so clenched—
At the look of abject fear on his kid’s face, Tony whips around to face the figure, pulling out his watch at the same time and transforming it into an Iron Man gauntlet with one twist of his wrist: it’s the little girl’s dad, the one dressed shaggily in his pajamas. “Back,” says Tony, exhausted and freakishly calm, “off.”
Now with his hands in the air, the Paxton dad backs up, grayish hair hanging shiny over his forehead, glancing once to his daughter before taking a good number of steps away. Behind him, his wife is crying silently, her hand pressed over her mouth. “Stark,” he says stiffly, “just let me get my daugh—”
“I said back off ,” Tony repeats, his hand-gauntlet still trained on the man. “No one’s coming near my kid.”
Paxton nods slowly, taking another step back, and several doctors usher the upset parents out of the stairwell.
And that’s when it happens—behind him, Tony feels a touch, a small one, the brush of fingertips against his pinky. It’s just a second, and then they’re back, hooking loosely onto his ring and pinky fingers like a toddler to his mother. The touch is gentle—hesitant—and then another.
Tony doesn’t know what it was that did it—that made Peter cross that fateful line between terrified and safe. It could’ve been the sound of the gauntlet clicking into place or the sight of someone’s back turning to him. Maybe it was Tony's smell or his voice or his figure or the way he stood.
Whatever it was, it worked.
Peter recognized him.
Somewhere in the recesses of his abused mind, Peter knows. Peter knows he’s safe with Tony.
And as the kid can’t seem to recognize anything else around him—the hospital, the doctors, even Pepper—this is a start. It’s something.
Tony stays still as the kid’s fingers linger on his; he doesn’t dare turn around. It’s me, he thinks, pleading. It’s me.
A doctor pipes up, voice shrill: “He really shouldn’t be out of the ICU—“
At the mere sound of another person’s voice, the kid startles, the grip on Tony’s fingers becoming so tight that the kid’s super-grip might be bruising him. “Can we open up another hospital room?” Pepper asks quietly. “Somewhere close? And quiet? Where you can examine them both?”
“Yes, ma’am,” says the doctor, who quickly moves aside and disappears through the stairwell doors.
“Alright, Pete,” says Tony, quiet and calm as he can, “you feel like going for a stroll?”
Peter blinks emptily. This haze the kid is in—frightening. He only ever saw Peter like this in the television: the calm before the storm.
At least he’s not screaming.
The kid seems to have pulled himself into some semblance of calm, one arm wrapped around the little girl, the other clasped loosely around Tony’s fingers. “Okay?” Tony whispers, searching for confirmation. “Is that okay?”
You’re in charge, Pete. You’re in charge.
A pause—Peter taking it in, his mind whirring like an old clock. He nods, and he nods again, and his fingers tighten. He tries to stand—but his legs buckle beneath him, and he falls hard onto the stairwell floor.
“Do you want help with—“
Tony hasn’t even mentioned the girl by name, and Peter’s eyes alight with something primal and vicious, and he huffs, twisting so quickly in an attempt to protect himself and the girl that he collapses back into the wall.
Peter tries four more times to stand up.
Each time, his broken leg collapses beneath him; each time, he gets back up.
They all wait, patient—Tony, Pepper, and the couple medical staff left in the stairwell.
Finally, he locks one arm beneath Cassie, leans back against the wall, and slides himself into a pained standing position, still with one hand in Tony’s. He’s gripping Tony’s hand with such profound force that the man can feel his knuckles grind against one another, but he doesn’t care.
The doctor points to the lower stairwell door—so Tony begins to move, shuffling towards the stairs as Peter follows. His limp is so pronounced that each step sounds like a heartbeat: la- dum, la- dum, la- dum.
The stairs are difficult, but they take their time. Peter has stopped crying by now, his face leeched of all emotion except for hesitant panic.
The hospital does its best to empty the hallways as Peter goes through. He follows slowly, one pain-heavy step at a time, favoring his left leg like a peg-legged pirate. Tony leads him carefully, his hand gentle around Peter’s cold fingers, like he’s leading a kid to his first day of kindergarten.
The doctor ahead opens up a nearby hospital room—the closest empty one—props up the door, and ushers them all inside.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 — 8:04 PM
Harley Keener has spent the last six hours traveling.
Since getting a call from a local New Hampshire morgue this morning, he found the earliest possible flight, boarded on hour later, flew another hour to Boston—the closest major city—then took a three-hour-long bus trip to some rural New Hampshire mountain town he’s never fucking heard of. His ears still haven’t popped from the flight.
The morgue’s call from this morning still echoes in his mind. “ Hello ,” said the voice on the other end, a young woman. “Is this…” There was some light shuffling of paper. “...Harley Skivorski?”
“It’s Keener,” he said sharply. “Harley Keener.”
“Son of Leonard Skivorski and Rose Keener?”
He sat up iron-straight in his twin dorm bed. “That’s me,” he said carefully. “What’s going on?”
They explained it to him carefully: in such deliberate terminology that it was like they were reading from a teleprompter. “… and your father was killed—the autopsy revealed that he died sometime on Thursday night.”
“Autopsy?” he echoed, dazed by the sudden words.
“ Yes, Mr. Keener. Usually the medical examiner requires consent for an autopsy, but as the manner of death was ruled a homicide—”
“Homicide?”
“Yes.”
“But how did he—how did he—” He sat down, falling onto his dorm bed. He still hasn’t put on the sheets.
A pause from the woman on the other line. “The cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds.”
Over the phone, they’d mentioned they’d identified the man successfully through fingerprints, but they still want a positive ID from a family member. That meant him.
So here he was: on the back end of a three-hour bus ride to the middle of nowhere so that he could identify his father’s body. He hasn’t seen the man in months —apparently, he ran off in the middle of a shift at the hospital and never came back. Now, that wasn’t unusual for Harley’s dad. He’d been an alcoholic for most of Harley’s childhood, so going on random benders and going missing for a few weeks was certainly in his wheelhouse.
But, the thing is, his dad had been good for the past three years. Sober, steady job, visiting Harley and his mom regularly… He hadn’t touched a bottle since Harley got to high school.
A weight of disappointment in Harley’s chest.
But that’s how it was with addicts, right? They always went back to their drug of choice, even if it hurt the people around them. Harley wasn’t surprised his dad had gotten himself shot—maybe he was buying drugs or indebted to the wrong people.
Whatever it was, it still hurt.
Harley gets off the bus sometime around nine o’clock and walks the rest of the way. The morgue is located between a gas station and a funeral home. As he walks up, he finds a couple employees at the front, chatting as one locks the front door—god, it’s late. He’s too late. “Wait!” he says, frantically rushing forward.
Both employees are dressed in lab coats; all have nametags pinned to their fronts. They turn as he calls out, and one of them backs up as he approaches. “I was supposed to—” Harley starts out of breath, “I was supposed to come here.”
One doctor checks his watch as the others filter away, pulling off their lab coats and heading to their cars. “Come back tomorrow,” he says. “We open at seven.”
Honestly, he had thought his father was on a bender. It wasn’t unusual for him. Harley hadn’t reported him missing, hadn’t put up missing persons posters, hadn’t asked his friends or coworkers where he was…
For months, Harley had accepted his dad’s radio silence.
He had assumed the worst of him—that his father had abandoned him once more, had left him to drown his woes in alcohol.
But Harley was wrong.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 — 9:18 PM
It’s been a long night.
After getting Peter and Cassie to the hospital room, things went to chaos pretty quickly. The kids, confused and frightened, have spent the last couple hours curled up in the corner of the room and hugging each other.
And beyond this hospital room, the hospital is wholly silent. Everyone saw or heard what happened: two recently-kidnapped kids screaming each others’ names and crossing the entire hospital in order to reach each other. How one had woken himself out of unconsciousness from an ICU bed and crossed the entire building to get to her and protect her from a perceived threat.
“Peter,” Dr. Jackson tries to explain for the umpteenth time, squatting a few feet away from the kids, “we really need to get you back on your IV. I know it’s scary, but we’re just trying to keep you safe. Your body can’t take all this strain.”
Peter Parker scans the room again, his glassine eyes traveling over the people inside: the doctor in front of him, Tony leaning against the bed, Pepper hovering in the corner, a nurse lingering in the doorway. He’s still holding Cassie like a baby, his arms trembling from the strain. “Kid, you gotta trust me,” says Tony. “We’re trying to keep you and Cassie safe. Just let the doctor help you.”
His eyes linger on Tony’s face, gaze dragging over Tony’s tangled gray beard and gaunt face; Tony feels suddenly entirely conscious of what he looks like to the kid—an unshaven, unkempt shadow of his former self.
The thing is, Tony didn’t know what Peter’s life was like outside of that single hour onscreen each day. He didn’t know that he shared a room with a little girl (a ten-by-ten space barely big enough for an animal, like Steve told him), or what they fed him (a couple cans of beans or soup or fruit), or if they hurt him offscreen. He didn’t know who spoke to him or who… Or who… Who…
(God, he can’t go down this road again. Every time he keeps thinking about it, he finds himself in a near-faint flood of sick upset. He can’t think about it. He won’t think about it.)
Tony had no idea that this little girl was part of Peter’s life; vaguely, he knew that Charlie and his goons had kidnapped Scott Lang’s daughter, too—Lang being the man who filmed Peter each day—but he never once wondered what happened to her. His mind was always chock-full of too much else. He didn’t know that the little girl was in there with him. Or that Peter—as his self-sacrificial, stupidly brave self—would feel the need to protect her.
That was so Peter . To protect a kid like this. He always did sweet things like that before ( it, everything, when Tony’s world came crumbling down ) what happened: escorted kids to school if they were too scared, waited for parents to show up at the hospital, rescued their stuffed animals from burning buildings… Peter loved helping kids, and it seems that Cassie is no exception. And even when Peter’s so traumatized he can’t see straight—still, he’s there for Cassie. Deep in his subconscious, he knows that he has to protect her.
Dr. Jackson clears her throat. They’re standing by the foot of the hospital bed now, far enough from Peter and Cassie that they’ve started to relax, their breathing slowing. “One of the other doctors paged—said that giving Cassie some food helped calm her a little,” she says.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to…” starts Tony, thinking back to the day before.
The woman grimaces. “A little won’t hurt. Besides…” She takes a slow, sad glance to her patient. “...we’re running out of options here.”
Soon, a nurse brings back a couple trays of doctor-approved food for both children: a cup of lukewarm soup, a matching cup of water, a piece of soft white bread. The tray clinks as the doctor places it down, announcing it to both of them. “...okay?”
Neither of the kids move. In fact, they seem to both go stiff, the girl half-turning her head and freezing bodily once she sees the tray. The little bald girl, her head bandaged in white loops, whispers into Peter’s ear—the good one, not the burnt one. She speaks so quietly that Tony and the doctor share a confused look. Cassie’s whisper is barely more than a breath of air, and Peter’s grunts of response aren’t even words, just a hiss between his teeth or a slight nod.
Peter glances from Tony to the doctor and back again, the only movement in the jerky whites of his eyes. He breathes in rasped huffs; Cassie coughs, hacking up mucus into the crook of his shoulder, and the kid doesn’t even flinch. They look terrible.
The strain on his mind and body, Tony supposes, is too much—because then Peter sways, faint, sweat speckling over his pallid forehead.
“It’s okay,” Tony tries, strained, and he reaches his hand out again. Maybe the kid will take it. “It’s okay, Peter. We just want you to get better.”
With his other hand, he nudges the tray forward—
—and Peter’s entire face goes slack.
Tony’s not even sure he understands what’s going on, but Cassie—the little girl—seems to. She realizes it’s happening before it even registers in Tony’s mind. Peter’s knobby arms loosen from the girl, his wrists slackening and his neck sloping.
The small girl slips from Peter’s arms.
Tony backs the fuck up. Meanwhile, Cassie scrabbles at Peter’s neck, yanking at his shoulders and arms, suddenly shouting for the first time since he’s met her: “No, Peter, don’t—no Peter no Peter please don’t leave me— don’t leave me, come back—come back Peter no no come back—”
Save the little girl, the hospital room is silent; all eyes are on Peter. The kid’s gone blank , his eyes taking on this dull, sleep quality. A layer of sweat comes over him—a sallow, wet gleam—and he lets go of Cassie.
Whatever consciousness that was present in Peter only seconds ago is now gone—Tony calls his name a couple times, as does the doctor, and he doesn’t even blink. “Peter. Peter. ”
Blank. Empty. Like whiteboard scrubbed clean with vinegar spray or the hollow of a carved pumpkin scraped to its stringy white walls.
The doctor and nurse move quickly—pushing Tony to the side in order to reach them both. Cassie fights tooth and nail against the thick-armed nurse, clawing rabidly at skin and cloth in her attempt to get away—all the while crying.
But Peter doesn’t move. The doctor manhandles him into the bed, pushing him down and promptly taking his vitals. “He’s okay,” Dr. Jackson says, as Peter lays supine on the sheeted hospital bed, his arms spread and startlingly limp. “Just…overwhelmed, I think.”
Peter still responds to some things: his eyes flick lightly at the sound of Cassie’s voice, but otherwise he’s lifeless. With him so docile, the doctors are able to re-insert his IV and get some a sedative into him; after a while, Peter falls into a gentle rest, evidence of the altercation only clear in the growing bruises on his side from when he fell on the stairs. He’s not quite asleep—but he blinks occasionally, stirred by the movement in the room.
“It’s not uncommon,” says Dr. Jackson, after switching his IV bag, “for victims of severe assaults to act like this.”
To just… leave their bodies? To disconnect so completely from the present that they can barely move?
“They find,” she continues, “that it’s easier than being present for the assault itself. The mind just…tucks itself away for a while.”
And this Peter—the one who is tucked away—doesn’t pull away when Tony offers up his hand. When Tony shifts his finger against the kid’s, Peter’s sleepy eyes fall upon him.
The kid looks so fucking tired.
“You might want to go,” says Dr. Jackson, holding up a thin plastic tube. Tony’s barely familiar with medical devices—he knows what a nasogastric tube looks like—and knows she’s trying to warn him that inserting the tube might be unpleasant. “
The kid twitches his fingers suddenly against Tony’s wrist, moving slightly until finally Peter’s fingers loosely grip his wrist.
Tony’s not sure that the kid even knows what he’s doing—but the movement is clear. Stay.
“I’m here, buddy,” Tony says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 — 11:10 PM
Flint Marko goes to Massachusetts first—to the military base holding the four soldiers.
It’s completely dark once he arrives, and most of the base is asleep.
He is Sandman, but sneaking into the base is still difficult. He has to leave his arsenal of weapons behind, clinging instead to a handful of potassium-cyanide pills that he seals in a tiny ziploc bag. Flint slips beneath the front door a few grains at a time, past dozens of his guards, his whole body morphing and melding to fit beneath the door-sill.
Reaching a door entitled HOLDING CELLS in the basement, Flint sifts beneath the door, greeting a row of sleeping men in an array of cells, all dressed in nondescript, light-colored jumpsuits. Each has his own cell—attached to the other rooms by an array of steel jail-bars blocking them from entering the other men’s areas. There are four men in total, and all of them remain sleeping as he approaches, still in his sand form. Some have clearly been beaten—broken noses, black eyes, casted wrists—and sleep with hitched breaths, some even with arms curled around their chests: birds with broken wings.
Sifting himself through the barred door of the first cell, Flint reforms to his physical self one grain of sand at a time. Now standing in this room, he feels himself become flesh-and-blood again—it feels good , like spreading roots into the fertilized earth.
A pang of feeling in his chest as he watches the man sleep—he thinks of Penny, his little girl, stuck in her hospital bed. What would his sweet Penny say if she could see her father now: a minute away from slaughtering a man in his bed?
Flint does not know what this man has done to deserve his death—he doesn’t care.
He dissolves his hands into sandy clumps, and he presses them, hard, over the soldier’s body and mouth. The soldier awakes with a start; he attempts a shout, but Flint presses harder, filling his mouth with sand until the sound is fully muffled. Every thrash, every instinct this man has to run—it’s all blocked by Flint’s sand, which has hardened into near-stone around him. It pins down his arms, his hips, and his legs; the soldier is helpless. “Take it easy,” says Flint, a gruff whisper, “or I’ll kill you anyway.”
The man immediately stops moving.
“Now,” Flint continues quietly, still pressing his sand-hands over the soldier, “I’m gonna ask you a couple questions. You’re gonna blink twice for yes, once for no. And if I think you’re lying” —Flint’s good at that— “I’m gonna kill you. Understand me?” He takes a glance at the man’s nametag, and, finding nothing but a number, decides maybe it’s better not to remember them each by name. He’s memorized his script—so Flint begins. “Do you know the name of the man you work for?”
Flint can take a guess as to who employed him—some high-level government official, most likely, trying to cover up some misdeeds. That’s usually who he kills for.
The man blinks twice, squeezing his eyes shut with such deliberation that a tear squeezes out one corner on the second blink.
“Have you mentioned his name to anyone?”
The man glances briefly to the left—and then back at Flint—and he blinks once.
He’s lying. Stupid. “I told you not to lie to me,” he says, and Flint can feel the man’s warm heartbeat quicken beneath his hands. He moves quickly, some sand from his forearm popping open the ziploc bag and removing the potassium-cyanide tablet before crushing it and shoving the released powder down the man’s throat with a flood of sand.
The soldier chokes and gags—but nothing comes up.
It only takes him a minute to die.
The other three soldiers—like their buddy—go the same way. Liars, the lot of them. They die quickly and in their beds; Flint Marko supposes the corpses won’t be found until morning.
He leaves the military base the way he came, as sand flooding over the concrete floors. No one notices as he reforms outside the base, strolls to his parked car, and climbs inside.
Clean. And quiet. Four perfect kills. Each completion is twenty thousand dollars, so Flint has just made eighty thousand dollars more towards his daughter’s medical treatment.
His next few targets are in New Hampshire: nine unemployeds located at some local prison.
Flint turns on the radio as he drives out of Massachusetts; there’s lots of country music as he enters New Hampshire.
The drive to the prison is a couple hours long, and he spends most of it switching between the stations and trying to find something good. The the service starts to give out somewhere in the mountains, so he switches through channels until he gets to a news station—the only radio station that’s not a haze of static.
“... an off-duty police officer from New York City was found on the scene in full uniform. NYPD has yet to confirm the officer’s identity—apparently the damage to her face was so severe that the department was unable to make a positive ID on facial recognition alone.”
In New Hampshire? Flint doesn’t know much about the tiny state, but he’s never heard of such violent crimes like that one. Isn’t the state of New Hampshire full of senior citizens and tree-huggers? He turns up the volume as he speeds down the highway.
“... Paxton-Lang was reported missing on April 6th. She was taken from her home kitchen in Forest Hills and had not been seen since. According to sources at a nearby hospital, seven-year-old Cassandra has been reunited with her parents, finally found after almost five months…”
Paxton-Lang. Cassandra Paxton-Lang. That’s one of his targets.
Flint hasn’t done any in-depth research of his last two targets yet. Are they… children?
He’s never had a child as a target before. Teenagers, sure, but no one under fourteen.
Cassandra’s a popular name, right? It could be someone else. He tunes in to the radio then, turning up the volume again as he approaches his destination. It continues: “...a seventeen-year-old boy who remains unidentified, both found by enhanced enforcement and local police in an abandoned underground bunker in the White Mountains. Sources say the boy has ties to the Avengers, as just-released aerial footage caught recluse-CEO-Avenger Tony Stark holding the teenager after the rescue. Next up tonight: flu season is coming! Check with your local doctor for vaccination dates…”
Flint Marko ignores his suspicions and turns off the radio for the rest of his car ride. He doesn’t need to be thinking about his later targets when he has nine sitting inside of this local prison.
He parks his car a couple of miles away from the prison, dissolves himself into sand, and weaves through the trees as sand, silent.
Flint has people to kill.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 7:00 AM
Harley arrives at the morgue half-an-hour early.
He is let in by a grumpy janitor with a brownish string-mop and a wringer bucket filled with soapy water. He shoves open the door with the handle of his broom and ushers Harley inside, muttering when his muddy chelsea-boots track dirt on his just-mopped linoleum.
He sits in a waiting room and reads pamphlets on cremation while he waits, listless. He’s got on some jeans, a beige sweater, and an overcoat that used to belong to his dad. He tries not to think about that too much—the fact that his dad is lying cold somewhere in this building.
He has to fill out a couple forms—insurance, identification, blah, blah, blah—and he does it quickly. When he returns the clipboard to the woman at the front desk, her thin eyebrows shoot up a bit as she scans the form.
“You’re a minor,” says the secretary as she continues to read.
“Yep,” says Harley. “Seventeen.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asks.
“Graduated early,” he explains stiffly.
“Where’s your mom?”
“I’m…emancipated,” he says. “Legally.”
“But…” the woman starts.
Harley lets out a harsh sigh. “Look—I’m just trying to do this thing and get out of here. Can we cut it with the twenty questions? Whatever you need me to sign, I’ll sign it. Just let me see my dad.”
The secretary’s hard stare softens just a little. Her manicured fingers tap on the clipboard he just returned. She taps at the computer for a few seconds before she looks back to him through her cat-eye glasses. “You don’t want to wait for your mom? ”
They must’ve called her, too. Harley’s mom and dad never technically divorced—just separated after his dad’s alcoholism got bad enough. It would make sense that she still stood as his next of kin. “Like I said,” Harley says dryly, “I’m emancipated.”
The unspoken words are clear: no.
The secretary purses her lips and scuttles off with the clipboard in hand. She returns a few minutes later with a lab-coated woman—she’s pale with short dark hair, nearly black eyes, and a pair of purple glasses. She greets Harley with a soft smile, holding the clipboard from earlier.
The mortician brings him through the morgue and to a lone table, where a sheeted body lays completely flat. The thing is so still it can’t possibly be his father.
But there he is—white cloth draped over him, but Harley spots the bag of his clothes to the left. Those are his dad’s shoes: embarrassingly white, thick-soled sneakers. His necklace. His dirty black socks.
Harley’s face hardens.
“I do have to warn you,” says the mortician, fingers tapping against the clipboard, “your father was shot in the head at point-blank range. It left most of his face unidentifiable. That’s why we didn’t contact you right away.“
“Then how did you know?“
The woman winces. “Police were able to do some fingerprinting. Plus, we found these in his pockets.”
She pulls out a prescription pad zipped into a plastic bag labeled EVIDENCE. She passes the bag to him; her hands are cold when he takes it from her. Harley grasps it gingerly, only able to see the first page of the pad, where it reads, Dear Harley . If you’re reading this…
He swallows. “Oh,” he says, and his chest feels tight.
“And there’s five more just like it. He wrote dozens of them—all addressed to you. Dates back to May fourteenth of this year.”
Harley holds the bag carefully, like a baby, his fingers making imprints in the clear plastic folds.
“Can’t let you keep those, unfortunately—police need them for the investigation. But once they get scans of them, they’ll send it right to you.”
The mortician asks him several times if he’s alright; each time he answers with a rigid “yes.”
She takes the backpack and hands him a stack of papers: the autopsy report. “Usually, we have to wait for next of kin to do one, but” —the mortician clears her throat and pushes back a wave of her dark hair— “because of the manner of death… Autopsies are always required in the case of, um, homicide. And I just want you to know… Your father won’t look like himself. His death was extremely violent. But state law still requires next of kin to identify the body, so…”
He’s barely listening to her.
The report is almost thirty pages long; Harley flips through most of them, finding blank figures with drawn-on injuries. On the first page: The decedent sustained 24 gunshot wounds (GSWs) from nine-millimeter bullets. All entered the front side of the body, except GSW 1, which entered from the submandibular triangle…
Harley continues to skim the document. It details each gunshot wound’s location, severity, and fatality—as well as other sustained injuries and conditions. The decedent died early Friday morning. He had several nutritional imbalances. Samples of chest and femoral blood…
Forget it. He’s no scientist. He can barely understand most of the report, anyway. “Just show me,” he says. “Please.”
The mortician nods, and she pulls back the sheet slowly.
His face is completely mutilated. Unrecognizable. His body is riddled with holes. But that’s his dad’s hair. His blondish-gray beard. His freckled forearms. His beer belly. His tattoo of Harley’s birthday on his forearm.
Painful tears well in the back of Harley’s throat.
From beside him, the mortician clears her throat. “Is that your father? Leonard Skivorski?”
“Yeah,” says Harley, his voice cracking. “That’s him.”
“I don’t understand,” says Harley, as the mortician leads him out of the lab. “What happened to him? How’d he get so…”
The woman nods, lifting her chin to the other guys in the waiting room—ones Harley didn’t see earlier. “That’s what they’re here for.”
They’re two men, guys Harley has seen on television dozens of times before: Captain American and the Winter Soldier.
Or, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.
“Hey,” says Harley awkwardly, with a small wave of his hand.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 8:22 AM
It’s on the news.
It’s on the fucking news.
Happy is on the Quinjet when the news breaks—he’d fallen asleep on one of the cots with his laptop on—news channel on. He’d been scouring local news last night for any mention of Peter, making sure they kept his name out of local mouths, but he’d been so tired…
And this morning, Happy sees it like a sickening punch; he feels the blood drain from his head as the reporter onscreen speaks, dressed in a red suit and gripping a microphone in front of a local prison. “..of the thirteen arrested on Mount Cabot—all suspected as part of the group who kidnapped the missing Cassie Paxton-Lang was found a couple nights ago—six of the thirteen have been found dead in their jail cells. Four of the suspects were soldiers currently on leave; and late last night, while in solitary confinement at a Massachusetts military base, all four took their own lives. They were found just this morning. Another two suspects, both held at a local jail—were also found dead this morning, apparently having taken their own lives as well. The suspects’ names have yet to be released to the public—although one has been identified as New York police officer’s brother— Charles Keene.
“As of right now, the rest of Keene’s thirteen accomplices are currently on suicide watch and being moved to anonymous holding locations in case of any foul play. No word still on the victims. Up next: back-to-school shopping…”
Happy rushes in to the hospital with his phone in one hand and his taser in the other.
He tracks down Pepper and Tony, who are sitting in the hospital cafeteria; she’s trying to coax a dejected Tony into eating some lasagna with a plastic fork.
“We gotta go,” he says, and they both look up.
“What?” they say simultaneously.
“I said we gotta go, ” he repeats, this time with much more emphasis. He grabs Pepper by the arm, and Tony drops his fork. Neither of them seem to grasp the gravity of the situation, so he grabs Tony, too, yanking him up from the cafeteria chair. “It’s all over the news—Peter’s in danger.”
They barely have time to ask questions before he’s lugging them both towards the exit. “What—what happened?” asks Tony, still struggling to keep up with his twitching limbs. He seems calmer now—he must have gotten a good amount of rest at Peter’s bedside.
“Six of those goons killed themselves last night,” Happy announces as they storm through the cafeteria’s double doors. He doesn’t fail to put air quotes around ‘ killed themselves .’ “Six. They found them all this morning—and four of them were being held at a goddamn military base. We gotta get Peter out of here. And the girl, too.” They’re at the elevator now, and Pepper’s spamming buttons into her phone again—probably telling the other Avengers to meet them at the Quinjet. “Fuck—which floor are they on?”
Tony slams the button for the fourth floor; his hand doesn’t shake.
The elevator doors close too slowly, and Happy taps the butt of his phone against his leg, itching to get to the kid. “Goddamn it—goddamn it—we’ve gotta get them to the Tower. If someone’s going after the witnesses, then they’re gonna go after the kids. Fuck—fuck— they could already be here—
Pepper doesn’t look up from her phone, texting so fast that her fingers blur. Her face is drawn into a tense frown. “All the security measures should be in place at the Tower. If we get them there in time, they’ll be sa—” The elevator doors open with a ding! and the three of them rush out so fast that the doors don’t have time to slide open the full way.
Happy, Pepper, and Tony get to Peter’s room in seconds; inside, a couple of nurses tend to Peter while the little girl and her mother sit at the foot of his bed, hugging each other while the mother attempts to console her. “Mr. and Mrs. Paxton?” calls out Pepper, who has now stashed her phone in her pocket. “You all need to come with us.”
“What?”
“Your daughter is in danger. We have someplace safe to go—I assure you, you will all be safe there. But you need to come with us. Now”
The blonde mother—Mrs. Paxton—gathers up her crying daughter and quickly follows Pepper outside. The Quinjet’s still parked on the rooftop, so she will bring them straight there.
Happy shoves aside one of the nurses to grab Peter—both nurses start to protest and call out for help—so he pushes them both into the wall while Tony grabs the kid, pulling tubes and wires from him as beeping fills the room.
One nurse cries, "He's not stable! Wait—he's not stable!" but Happy ignores him—they've got some medical stuff on the Quinjet. They don't have a chioce. Better that then letting something happen to the kid on some shit doctor's watch.
The kid’s unconscious, just like the first time Tony did this. The billionaire wraps the hospital sheets around the kid, scoops his arms up below the knees and back, and he lifts Peter up bridal-style, as gentle and fast as he possibly can. His legs struggle under the weight, so Tony activates his Iron Man gauntlets, allowing the metal braces to slide down over his arms and elbows to assist him.
Happy is surprised to find that the run-ragged Tony Stark is fast while carrying Peter, staggering quickly after Happy while holding the sheeted bundle of a kid, racing down the hospital hallways as they escape to the Quinjet.
After another strained elevator ride, they’re at the rooftop, chased by medical personnel and some hoarse doctor yelling, “Security! Security!”
But they’ve got the kids. Both of them. If they stay here, they're sitting ducks. Happy has to take them all back to New York.
Natasha was right. This situation is far too complex for a couple of drug addicts to come up with. Someone else is in control of this whole operation. Someone with money. Someone with power. Someone who could trap the genius Tony Stark in his lab. Someone who could kidnap an enhanced super-kid. Someone who could hack into fucking JARVIS. Someone who could afford to slaughter six people in their jail cells and make it look like a suicide.
Someone is behind all of this.
It doesn't matter—because Happy’s gonna get everyone out of here and safe.
And back to the Tower—where they belong.