you barely are blinking
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 10:47 AM
Bucky Barnes has tortured and killed so many people that violence has become his second nature.
But when he sees Quentin Beck, he hesitates.
He thinks so clearly of what Steve said to him in that miserable, dejected voice: Bucky—please—please understand. I didn’t want to, I didn’t mean to hurt you… I just—I was just trying to keep him away from Peter and I—it was all I had , baby, it… It was all I had.
Quentin Beck stands up, a handcuff dangling around one wrist. He’s dressed in a prisoner’s jumpsuit—a yellowed white color—and he tilts his head at the Winter Soldier even though Bucky is two inches taller. The room is empty save the cot behind him—one that looks eerily similar to the one in that HYDRA bunker.
His brow raises. “Nice costume,” says brown-haired Beck, with a distasteful amount of snark. There’s a stain of dried blood beneath his nose—the center of his face swells with a coming bruise. Maybe one of the other lock-ups came after him. “Is that supposed to scare me?”
All hesitation bleeds out of Bucky’s mind at Beck’s cocky smirk; he’s an animal—a barbarian—and he curls his lips away from his teeth, and that brewing anger in his belly goes taut. “Yes,” says Bucky.
“Not as threatening without all your little toys, huh?” Beck says with another tilt of his head. “No guns, no knives. Not so scary without any weapons, Barnes.”
“Don’t need them,” he says darkly, and his voice comes out of him deep , from the sickly depths of his lungs like a tarred fume. “I am one.”
The Soldier moves, crossing the entire room in three heavy steps—and with both hands, he shoves the brown-haired man backwards into the cushioned wall. The impact knocks the wind out of him, and the man falls forward, coughing, onto his hands and knees as he tries to draw air back into him.
The Soldier grabs the man by the hair, yanking the gasping man up so hard that he squeals like a stuck pig. “Quentin Beck,” he says. The man fights, scrabbling uselessly at Bucky’s grip, and he shoves Beck face-first into the wall before twisting his arm behind his back with a violent jerk. “Someone killed six of you last night—who was it?”
The man groans into the wall; Bucky twists it further, his arm bending so far back that it becomes an alien thing, fingers wiggling sporadically; Beck squeals in pain. “I asked you a fucking question — who was it?”
“The fuck do you care— ah!”
He twists with such force that the man’s shoulder pop s, and then he drops the guy as he sobs, curling into himself on the ground, the joint of his arm swinging loose. “The assassin, ” Bucky growls, leering over the man, “what’s his name?”
The pervert’s too busy crying into the floor to answer. “What the fuck, man? I didn’t do any—”
“ His name!”
The man scrambles backwards against the prison cot, holding his arm carefully—Beck’s getting pissed , his brown eyes glinting. “He didn’t tell me—he didn’t fucking introduce himself before he broke my nose!”
That explains the bloody nose.
Bucky hits him again for good measure—a solid punch that snaps his head backwards—and then again. And again. And again. And when at last the blood’s coming down his face in a solid stream and his eyes are swollen cracks, then Bucky growls, “ His! Name!”
Bucky pushes his face hard into the floor, grasping his other shoulder fully in one vibranium hand, before Quentin Beck screams, “A h—ah—GODDAMN IT, FINE!” Relishing that extra second, Bucky releases the man. “But I don’t know his name, alright? He’s—he’s pretty popular with the higher-ups—world leaders, billionaires, mafia bosses…” He spits a mouthful of blood on the ground. “They call him the Sandman. Apparently, he’s enhanced—turns to sand at the drop of a hat, can sneak into any room, any building, and slip away undetected. He does it for money—and from what I’ve heard, he never turns down a job.” Beck smiles, all bloody teeth, his sweaty cheek pressed into the off-white floor—all the while his arm dangles useless at his side. “Happy now, you psychotic bitch?”
Bucky lifts his chin; his face betrays nothing. “Very,” he says, and he pins down the man’s arm, flattening it out on the floor. “But I…” The anger comes easy—bubbling and swirling in his gut and rushing to the heat of his face. “I have other business with you, Beck.”
And then the Soldier squeezes his vibranium fingers tightly around Beck’s pinky, and he tears off the appendage in one—quick—yank.
Beck screams with vicious rage—his arm pulling uselessly at Bucky’s grip. Bright blood spurts from the wound, spilling out on the white floor like a broken faucet. “Do you know who I am?” Bucky asks calmly.
“God—you psychotic fuck! My fucking finger!”
Bucky shoves his flesh-and-blood hand against the back of his neck, shoving the man’s face further into the floor; Beck coughs and sputters, his bleeding hand flailing limply. “I said,” Bucky says, through gritted teeth, “ Do you know who I am?”
“Yes—” Beck chokes out, blood spreading in a small pool around his hand. “Yes—”
“ Who am I?”
Gasp. “The Winter.” A gargled cough. “Soldier.”
“Good,” he says. He finds himself squeezing and squeezing Beck’s sweaty throat until the man’s legs flail, and only then does he hiss, “Then you know what I’m about to do to you.” He releases the man’s neck instead clamps his vibranium hand down on the man’s ring finger as the other wound still spurts.
“ What? “ The man squirms, trying to wriggle out from Bucky’s iron-tight grip, Bucky presses his knee into the man’s back. “What the fuck did I do to you, man? I told you what you wanted— ah! fuck! Wait wait wait—”
The Soldier does not hesitate—he tears off another without breaking a sweat and then crushes the still-warm finger in his vibranium palm.
Quentin Beck’s ugly scream fills the room.
Bucky grasps him by hair again, a handful of greasy brown strands—the man flails helplessly—hauls him up, and throws him hard into the closed door with a bang! His body leaves an imprint in the metal there.
A sick feeling— hate —surges up in him, and Bucky stalks towards him, broad shoulders twisting. He moves forward, and that sick pervert moves back, brown eyes darting from side to side.
“What are you gonna do?” scoffs Beck, nervously glancing around. He looks like something molten and twisted—pink-faced, shoulder hanging at his side, other hand dripping blood. “Kill me? You’ve committed about thirteen crimes coming in here—kill me, and you’ll be on death row before you can say Steve Rogers—”
“ Take his name out of your fucking mouth!” Bucky snarls, and he backhands the brown-haired man so hard that he knocks him to the ground.
“Ah,” he says, and he spits on the ground: bloody saliva before climbing back up to his feet, his hand still dribbling twin trails of blood from where his fingers used to be. His demeanor has suddenly changed, his head tilting slightly as he stares up at Bucky. “Did I strike a nerve?”
Bucky Barnes is going to hurt this man. He’s gonna make him wish he was never fucking born. He can’t find the words he wants to say, so he just stands there, seething, sweat coming suddenly down the crease of his back.
“Oh,” Beck says. His eyebrows shoot up, and then he laughs. The brown-haired man has the audacity to fucking laugh. “So that’s why you’ve got your panties in a knot,” he says, and he licks his white teeth clean of blood. “You’re fucking jealous. You’re jealous I got a piece of your star-spangled slut! Sorry, he didn’t know he was spoken for—”
The Soldier’s vibranium arm moves of its own accord, the whine of a thousand metal pieces, and pins Beck standing against the wall by his throat, clamping down.
But somehow the room feels the dynamic shift—the Winter Soldier no longer has the upper hand.
Beck opens his fucking mouth again, smirking; his eyes have a sudden wide craze, heightened by pain and adrenaline. “Supersoldiers are a dime a dozen these days,” he says, grinning and grinning like a fucking Cheshire cat, “not my fault yours got a little frisky—”
His metal fingers clench around the man’s sweaty neck, so tight now that the man gargles and coughs. “ Shut up!” he snarls. “Shut the fuck up!” Bucky punches him full-fisted in the shoulder—the already-dislocated one—and the bone there cracks.
Beck groans, head keeling forward, chest heaving. “ Fuck!— Jesus, look, he begged me to, it was nothing he didn’t want—”
The Soldier bares his teeth and grabs him by the throat to shut him up, lifts him up from the ground so that his feet dangle like a limp-feathered capon, and then he throws him across the room to slam against the prison cot.
The man rolls on his back like a beached turtle, coughing and coughing. “Come on, man,” he says, struggling to his knees and then to his feet, scooting backwards on the bed as Bucky comes forward, “ big fucking deal, it was just a blow—”
“You raped him!” snarls Bucky, and he feels more like an animal now, his teeth bared and every hair on his neck rod-straight. “You laid your dirty fucking hands on him, you sick piece of shit!” and he winds up and punches Beck in the side—another crack, maybe from a rib or the pelvis.
Bucky doesn’t care as long as something’s breaking.
The man groans into the ground, pained moans followed by nervous laughter, saying, “I think rape’s a little strong, he begged to blow me—”
“ SAY THAT ONE MORE TIME!” snarls Bucky, and he brings his boot down with a crunch over Beck’s bloody hand—he wails, “You fucking psycho! My hand! My hand!”
The man’s hand—or what’s left of it—now resembles a mangled pile of clay. The Soldier kneels on the ground, knee pressed into Beck’s chest, trapping him to the floor.
A sudden calm washes over Bucky—like he’s fallen into the depths of a murky hole.
“He told me what you did to him,” he says. He presses his clothed knee down into Beck’s chest, full-bodied, his broad shoulders shifting. “You know exactly what you did.”
And there’s a moment of silence thick with blood.
“You’re not gonna kill me,” whimpers Beck, glancing at the door. “You’re—you’re not—you wouldn’t—”
“No,” Bucky says, although he’s seeing visions now of Beck’s corpse: floating on a lake or pummeled to a bloody pulp. “Worse.”
Enhanced interrogation skills are a crucial part of the Winter Soldier’s skill set. The first thing they taught him were the parts of the boy most sensitive to intense pain. The eardrum. Groin. Under the eyelid. Arch of the foot. Tooth.
Bucky could paralyze him with one hit to the spine. Could cut out his vocal cords with one flick of a knife. Could beat him within an inch of his life without breaking a sweat. Could remove what was left of his pathetic dick in less than a second.
“Do you know what it’s like to be helpless, Beck?” Bucky says, his voice low.
Beck looks up, his face gone bloodless and pallid. “Wait—” he tries and Bucky shoves his vibranium hand over the man’s mouth.
His teeth gnash wetly against his metal palm, but Bucky’s fingers only tighten around his jaw until he stops. “Steve did,” says the Soldier, and as he speaks, he pries open Beck’s jaw to reveal rows of white teeth. “You made him feel helpless.”
The man gargles helplessly, head thrashing, and Bucky’s other hand forces him still. His metal thumb presses down, forcing each row of teeth apart. His thumb and forefinger find that first one—a flat incisor, white and smooth, and clamp down on it like a pair of dental pliers.
“You made him feel fucking afraid .”
Beck thrashes, shouting, all his words incoherent around Bucky’s metal hand.
Bucky’s brow hardens, his voice darkening into something sick. “You’re gonna know exactly what that feels like.”
And he pulls the tooth free with a squelch ; blood spills over the vibranium slits in the Winter Soldier’s hand.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 11:00 AM
When the Winter Soldier returns, his footsteps are loud—his combat boots clunk down the holding cell hallway with a sureness.
The Soldier approaches the front, waits for Deborah to unlock the passage-door, and she returns his personal items, placing them each on the counter. There’s something in his right hand, clenched tight in his vibranium fist, and the dark-haired man drops them on the counter as he recollects all of his weapons one by one: he straps his knives to his pants legs, slides his handguns into their holsters, and grabs his semi-automatic off the counter.
It’s teeth . He was holding teeth. Fifteen or twenty human teeth—with the fanged root intact—pink and shiny with blood.
He looks at her, and his face is spattered with red. His skin is coated in a thin, filmy sweat.
And he doesn’t say a word.
She’s never seen the Winter Soldier like this.
He gives a simple nod—a jerk of the chin—and secures his semi-automatic to his back, buckling it into place in his leather-strapped vest before turning to the door.
“Um, hey—guy?” she says, and all at once she doesn’t know what to call him. ‘Winter Soldier’ doesn’t seem appropriate for a moment like this—and when she tries to remember the villain-turned-hero’s actual name, her mind draws a blank. “You forgot…your…” She motions impossibly to the bloodstained teeth left on the police station counter.
He half-turns again, spotting the teeth. His eyes flick to hers; then the Soldier scrapes them from the counter with his vibranium palm with one scoop. For one long moment, he stares down at them with an unreadable glower, and finally the Winter Soldier squeezes them into his metal fist, metal grinding against bone.
When he opens his vibranium hand, the teeth have been crushed to a gravelly powder; the pinkish substance seems to fall between the cracks in his prosthetic limb and onto the floor of the police station.
Without saying another word, the Winter Soldier turns on his heel, combat boots clanking once more against the linoleum.
And once he’s gone, Deborah goes into the security room, dismisses the guy there, and starts deleting footage.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 1:57 AM
The Tower is a safe place.
That’s what Pepper Potts keeps telling herself. Still no word from Barnes and the others about the witness-killer, but they’ve still got a few Avengers here to protect the kids.
Dr. Cho handles everything medical while Pepper sticks to the media, ensuring with each passing second that these kids are out of the public eye.
Steve keeps stalking the hallways like a damn ghost, pacing so much that his footsteps drive the girl into a frantic panic attack—Pepper sets a chair by the elevator and posts him there instead.
A few hours pass like this—quietly—both the kids under enough sedation that they can get them solid medical treatment, and soon after Tony wakes.
Pepper’s alerted as soon as his heart rate goes up, so she strides in as her fiancé—ex-fiancé?—stirs, jerking himself awake and sitting up, looking dazedly around the room. By the time she’s inside his hospital room, Tony is slapping his forehead, blinking, and whisper-rambling about heat capacity ratios and blast radii. “Tony,” she says, and he doesn’t even register that she’s spoken, pressing his hand to his head again and muttering to himself. His hands are twitching again. “ Tony .”
It takes a few moments, but soon Tony comes back to himself, looking more tired than ever, hunched over the hospital bed. “He’s safe,” Tony says now, grinding his knuckles into his eyes. “Right? Right?”
“Yes,” she says, sitting on the hospital bed beside him.
“We got him out. You—you got him out.”
“Yes, honey, yes,” she answers, and the honey slips out with such ease that she immediately clamps her mouth shut afterward.
Tony wants to see Peter again, but he’s sleeping, so instead she takes him to Dr. Banner. Someone went back to Tony’s lab upstate and retrieved the sleep-supplement pills he’d been stashing there. Bruce Banner helps, reverse-engineering the pills and returning to them with a proper chemical composition. Returning to them with a sheet filled with chemical names and molecular compositions, he grabs Tony by the shoulder, looks him straight in the eyes, and says harshly, “Tony, you were taking these?”
Tony’s gaze drops.
“The hell is wrong with you, man?” he snaps, shaking Tony’s shoulder. It’s a much more visceral reaction than they originally got at the hospital, so Tony blinks in surprise. “You could’ve died. You could’ve—you could’ve—”
Tony doesn’t say much else. His hair is such a mess; Pepper really should get it combed for him. Those dark circles under his eyes look now even darker.
Bruce pulls a clear tupperware container out of his pocket; the little white pills rattle inside. “You know what’s in these things? Every goddamn stimulant on the planet. Jesus Christ, Tony.”
The man shrugs, his hands still twitching in his lap. “Didn’t have a choice,” he says quietly.
“How often?” asks Dr. Banner, and he presses his cold hands against Tony’s neck, two-fingered on the nodes of his throat, then
Tony shrugs, and that’s the truest answer he seems to come up with. “Whenever I was tired,” he says. “Whenever I woke up.”
Bruce checks over him for other effects, asking him more medical questions like “When did the twitching start?” and “How many hours of sleep did you get?”
“One,” he says to both Bruce and Pepper’s horror, “maybe two.”
Bruce just stands there, mouth half-open.
“Sometimes it caught up to me,” he says. “Every couple weeks, I’d pass out—wake up a day later with—with Peter on the screen.” His mouth twitches then, and he’s blinking, blinking, and shaking his head. “Needed it. Kept me up. Helped with…” He waves his hand awkwardly, and then suddenly there’s a tension in his face, and he glances sharply at Pepper.
With Peter , Pepper thinks. That’s what he wanted to say. That it helped with Peter.
But truly, Tony’s pills and lack of sleep didn’t end up mattering at all, right? Because although he spent months trying to create that weapon, it wasn’t the weapon that ended up saving Peter. After all that time, it was actually Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers who provided the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Not Tony. And not Pepper.
Truly, none of them saved him in time.
Peter went missing on Friday, April 6th, 2018, at approximately 7:42 PM.
He was rescued on Friday, August 24th, 2018, at approximately 12:30 AM.
Give or take, that meant—one hundred and forty days in captivity. Twenty weeks. Almost five months. Nearly half a year.
And enough to affect him for the rest of his life.
Dr. Cho returns to talk to her about Peter.
They stand outside the kid’s room. Tony’s down the hall getting his heart scanned—Banner said the drugs could’ve caused irreversible damage to it—and Pepper lurking outside of Peter’s door like Steve was only hours ago. “He’s experiencing what we call delirium,” she says. “It’s just a fancy word for a confused state of mind. It just means he’s not fully…awake right now. It’s probably caused by a lot of the things he’s gone through—sleep disturbances, the drug withdrawal, malnutrition, physical trauma, excessive pain… All of those alone are risk factors for delirium—so it makes sense that he’s struggling.” She frowns a little, clasping her hands around her tablet. “I gave him some low-dose haloperidol, which could help, but with everything he’s been through… I’m not sure how much good it’ll do.”
Pepper nods, taking a small step towards Peter’s hospital door, but Dr. Cho puts out her hand, suddenly frowning. “Just one more thing, Pepper—and you’re not going to like this.”
There’s many things she hasn’t liked about the past few days. There’s probably nothing Dr. Cho could say that could upset Pepper further.
“He’s on a low dose of sedatives, just to keep him from throwing himself off the bed again” —Pepper’s not sure if Cho’s referring to the incident at the New Hampshire hospital or a new one— “but even with the sedative, we had to… We had to place some restraints on Peter.”
Pepper feels her chest go cold. “You what? ” she echoes.
Dr. Cho taps Pepper’s arm. “I know. I know. But he was consistently injuring himself. Pulling out his IVs, snapping his oxygen masks… And besides that, he was violent with the nurses, violent with me, and…” She shakes her head. “I read his chart—the New Hampshire hospital sent over their records. He did this there, too—injuring nurses, injuring patients when he escaped his room?”
Pepper didn’t know about that part; she only saw the aftermath. “Probably,” she says. “He was pretty…agitated. Kept trying to reach that little girl.”
Dr. Cho nods, her dark hair sweeping forward. “Then the restraints stay on. At least until we can make sure he’s calm. I know it’s not the best for his current mental state, but he really can’t be injuring himself while he’s so fragile. We’re going to keep up the sedatives, some antipsychotics… We’re just trying to reorient him now.”
So when Dr. Cho allows her inside, Peter’s sitting on the bed, his arms turned out and bandaged thickly—IVs fed between the knobby knuckles of both hands, soft leather restraints buckled around both wrists. There's a small white tube in one nostril, curling out of his nose and taped across his cheek. He’s awake now, sitting up, and he’s breathing very, very hard.
There is a black-haired nurse beside him, fiddling with the IV bag beside him, peering through her gold-rimmed glasses at each label before switching out the bag. Peter blinks lethargically at Pepper, his head tilting, his breath hitching a little in his chest.
He looks like a kid. Like a drowsy little kid right before you tuck them in at night.
Except this kid has leather straps buckled around his wrists, and he’s pulling at them in quiet jerks: clink, clink, clink.
There’s something wild about him then, chained to the bed like that. Like a caged dog. “I thought you said he was sedated,” says Pepper, as Peter draws in raspy gulps.
“He is,” says Dr. Cho, drumming her nails against her tablet.
“Then isn’t he supposed to be…” She swallows. “Calm?”
The woman is quiet for a moment. “Doesn’t always work out that way. He’s developed quite a tolerance to our sedatives, Pepper, and we don’t want to risk giving him any more than we have to.”
“This is our only option right now,” says Dr. Cho. “You do understand that, right?”
Pepper doesn’t say anything.
This isn’t something she was ever prepared to handle.
“It’s easier this way, Pepper. Safer. Do you really want to retraumatize him every time we need to draw blood or change his IV?”
Pepper backs out of the room slowly, feeling now sick to her stomach. “I understand,” she says, although she’s lying straight through her teeth.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 12:39 PM
Flint Marko finds himself at some shitty diner in Vermont.
He orders a cup of coffee, some pancakes, and a mile-high stack of bacon; he douses his entire plate in syrup.
Flint’s done most of the work—killed six of the witnesses and threatened the rest into legal silence. It wasn’t difficult, either. Most of them were too deep into withdrawal to do much else than blindly agree to whatever he said.
He only has two left to kill: Cassandra Paxton-Lang and Peter Parker. He’s done his research. They’re both children. Well, Parker’s a teenager, but… He’s not a psychopath. Of course he has some reservations about taking care of them.
So he writes to his contact: the anonymous government guy. He’s researched the girl—she’s Penny’s age. Divorced parents, felon father, New Yorker… In another life, Cassie could be his daughter.
No children, he texts.
Some dots appear on his screen a few minutes later—he’s typing. At last, the message: Do it and I’ll pay one million for each.
Flint only does this job for one reason: funding for his daughter’s medical treatment. She should’ve been dead before she could read, but because of these sporadic gigs, she’s still here. Alive and breathing. Her treatment has cost millions upon millions of dollars—and dozens upon dozens of lives—but Flint would do it all again in a second.
It’s his child. He’d do anything for her.
So Flint, of course, gives in.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 3:18 PM
Maggie Paxton has never been to Avengers Tower before.
And now she’s got a cot here—a bedside cot in her daughter’s hospital room—as Captain America stalks the hallways, as Pepper Potts cries in the empty medbay rooms, as Tony Stark leans against walls to reserve strength in his shaking limbs.
Cassie is visited by doctor after doctor: immunologists and cardiologists, critical care specialists and dermatologists, gastroenterologists, neurologists and orthopedic surgeons.
And with each new person, Cassie gets more and more frightened. For most of them, she just hides her face in Maggie’s sweater, whispering frantically to herself.
Dr. Cho—the Avengers’ main doctor—returns in the late afternoon with general updates. Cassie sleeps in Maggie’s arms, thankfully unbothered. “So far,” she says, “your daughter looks good. Her scalp is recovering nicely. We’re flooding her with antibiotics—have to keep her immune system up—and she’s got a respiratory infection we’re still trying to shake—”
“The cough,” interrupts Jim, who’s seated in one of the bedside chairs.
The doctor nods. “It’s minor, but persistent. We’re going to continue to monitor her for fever, white blood cell count—anything that might suggest systemic infection.”
“And her hand?” asks Maggie, stroking her hand down Cassie’s back as her little girl mumbles incoherently, asleep. “What happens with that?”
“That’s the least of our problems right now,” she says. “We’re going to leave it, recast it and check for any surface-level infections, but we’re going to leave it as much as we can.” Dr. Cho touches Jim’s shoulder—it’s a barely useful attempt at comfort. “She’s going to be okay. It might take some time, but she will be okay.”
Jim looks at the doctor’s hand as though it burns, and then her husband shakes his head. “But she’s been… She’s been doing things.”
“Things?” echoes the doctor.
Jim shoves his hands into his pockets, dropping his voice low so as not to wake Cassie. “I don’t know. We’ll say something and she’ll just… do it. Cover her ears or close her eyes or make a run for it or just…stare at us. And she’s…” He drops her voice even lower. “She’s been wetting herself. Is that something we can…fix?”
Dr. Cho looks worn. Tired. Maggie remembers then that the woman is far younger than she is: at least by a decade. “Again, I’m not a psychiatrist. There should be someone here soon to… To help with that.”
The woman looks like she might say something else, but then she grimaces, nods, and briskly leaves the hospital room.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 11:05 PM
Peter sleeps through the night.
And all the while, Tony stays by his side.
They sedate him enough that his sleep is motionless and slack.
Not that it matters much how slack he is—with those leather-buckled restraints on either wrist, he’s not going anywhere.
As the night creeps on, Tony asks one of the nurses for a couple items: a water basin, a bottle of conditioner, a rat-tail comb, hair oil, and shampoo. The nurse returns in a few minutes with the supplies.
Pepper offers to help him, but Tony wants to do it himself.
Piece by piece, section by section, strand by strand, Tony Stark combs through his kid’s hair, handwashing it as best he can in the water basin, keeled over the head of Peter’s bed as he does it. He massages the dark tangles out of the kid’s hair—so much of his hair is so knotted that it’s become dreaded, tangled into a gnarled mess.
It takes time.
A couple hours go by, and then another.
Tony’s mind goes pleasantly blank as he works. He washes and washes and washes, unpacking layers of dirt and old dried blood from the kid’s hair, loosing it into the basin and refilling it again. He goes through the tangles with layers of conditioner and shampoo until he’s got the kid’s hair smooth and soft and smelling sweetly of clementine.
By the end, his hair is combed through. He looks so much more like Peter as his hair dries, clean curls drying on his forehead.
Tony ghosts his hand over the kid’s hair, pushing it away from his eyes. It’s long now that it’s untangled, reaching just past his shoulders. His hair and nails always did grow so fast— a Spider thing, Peter used to call it.
Tonight, for once, Tony doesn’t think about Charlie or his crew or the witness killer or anyone else. He thinks about Peter—and how peaceful he looks like this.
Tony hasn’t seen Peter Parker at peace in a long time.