gone to waste
TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 — 9:16 AM
Sam Wilson and Nat Romanoff have spent one day searching through the Lang-Paxton household for Cassie’s personal items—and the rest of the idea trying to track down Peter Parker’s belongings. It was a task much more difficult than they originally anticipated.
Because May Parker and her nephew Peter disappeared literally overnight, their landlord simply packed up their things and kept them a couple weeks in case they returned, and then sold, donated, or tossed the rest.
All of their original belongings—are gone.
So Tuesday morning, they head over to the compound to try to find some of Peter’s things, if they can.
The Avengers compound is empty. Hollowed out. At this point, everything in the compound has been packed up and shipped back to the Tower. But for some reason—on the second floor of Tony and Pepper’s personal building, there is Peter’s bedroom.
And unlike everything else in the compound, Peter’s bedroom is completely untouched.
When Sam lets go of the doorknob, he finds a thin layer of grayed dust on his hand; mildly disturbed, he wipes his palm on his pants to erase it.
Inside, Peter’s bedroom is as normal as any teenage boy’s.
It’s Star Wars themed; there’s a plastic R2D2 on his nightstand, an array of those old Jedi Apprentice books from the nineties, and a retractable lightsaber that Nat picks up and waves around as Sam peruses.
There’s a stainless-steel water bottle beside his twin bed. A Midtown High sweatshirt hanging on the closet door. A framed photo of him and his aunt at a comic book convention the year before. An array of Batman comics on his bookshelf. A Men in Black poster on his wall.
He’s a kid.
He’s just a kid .
Behind him, Natasha drags a duffel bag forward and tosses it onto the ground between them. “Fill her up, Wilson,” she says. They shuffle through the kids’ dresser drawers, but there’s not much there: several sets of pajama pants, some boxers, a couple T-shirts, and a worn MIT sweatshirt that looks like it belongs to Stark. In the second drawer, a notebook with only eight pages filled, a box of unopened legos, and a well-used DS with a Pokémon game still inside. My nephew has one of those, Sam thinks blankly.
He cracks it open—the game is open, in the middle of a battle. Peter’s playing as some kind of water creature, and the little animated thing is hopping from one foot to another as though waiting for its next command.
It’s like a punch to the chest.
It’s so incredibly small, yet somehow Sam can feel it’s unfairness weighing on his shoulders—Peter Parker was kidnapped halfway through a Pokémon battle he never got to finish.
Sam Wilson shoves the DS closed and tosses it into Nat’s duffle bag. She’s still messing with the lightsaber, flipping it from one hand to another like it’s a scimitar instead of a plastic toy.
He throws open Peter’s closet doors; inside, there are three more sweatshirts, a pair of heavy-duty nylon snowboots, and a pile of crisply wrapped presents, bows and all. “Pepper wrapped those,” says Nat, “She’s good at that kind of thing.” Pepper must have gotten them for the kid; maybe his birthday passed during his kidnapping.
Nat passes over the gifts, too, dropping them one by one into the duffel bag without opening them. Then she returns to that retractable lightsaber, pushes it in until it clicks, and tosses it in the air, flipping it into her palm. “You know,” she says, as Sam adds a row of hand-drawn graphic novels to the duffel, “I’ve seen a lot of dark shit in my time.”
Sam makes a hmph of assertion, kneeling by the duffel.
“But this?” Nat huffs, laying the lightsaber onto the kid’s Star Wars sheets. “You don’t see any worse than this, Wilson.”
Sam zips up the duffel bag, all of Peter’s belongings inside. “At least he’s…” Alive, he wants to say, but with the state Peter’s in, he’s not sure if that’s the right word for it. “At least he got to come home.”
Nat makes this strange sound, like she’s been kicked, and then she stands up, picking up the duffel. And as they go, closing Peter Parker’s bedroom door, she says, quietly, “I’m not sure that Peter would say the same.”
And they don’t know what Peter would say—that’s the thing.
Nat knows this. That Peter hasn’t said anything at all. Not about what happened. Nothing except for Cassie and Mr. Stark and the occasional please, no.
And him saying nothing…. What could be worse?
TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 — 11:23 AM
Tony and Pepper spend Tuesday morning remaking Peter’s hospital room.
Nat and Sam bring back a whole duffel bag of Peter’s things from the compound; and another bag filled with Cassie’s things, too.
It’s like old times—almost—like unpacking into a new apartment, into a new house, into a new compound.
While Peter’s gone for some kind of scan, Tony and Pepper remake his bed. Tuck in some light blue sheets, cover it in a comforter patterned with Millenium Falcon blueprints. One of the nurses helps them do it; Nurse Kaelyn’s an emergency nurse, but she took one look at that half-open duffel bag and started putting up posters. There’s one covered in math puns that Pepper remembers putting up on Pete’s birthday last year. God, this kid.
And as she’s folding up another blanket, bending back slightly to alleviate some of the pain in her lower back, she finds that Tony’s been staring at her across the room for just a little too long.
“What?” she snaps, but it’s more of an accusation, and the word comes out for harsher than she meant it to.
Tony ducks his head; his hair hangs a little shaggy from his scalp. “I just…” he says. “...keep thinking I’m dreaming you.”
That’s not how Pepper feels at all.
They haven’t spent more than a few hours together since Peter arrived—Pepper spends all of her time talking to lawyers and doctors, while Tony mostly sleeps.
She shouldn’t hate him for it—how much he rests these days—but she does. She spent months seething, thinking that Tony hit her just for the hell of it, and now he comes back, apologizes once and goes straight to sleep?
No amount of sad looks and twitching hands is going to alleviate that pressure in her chest saying—that’s him. That’s the guy who got you pregnant and abandoned you when you needed him most.
Pepper knows it’s not his fault. She does. She does.
Kind of.
They put up some of Peter’s pictures up on the walls: old ones of him and May and his uncle Ben, group photos of him and Ned and MJ, and even some of him and Tony. A baby picture, too, of him with his parents.
“How long have you known?” Tony asks, his voice hoarse; his eyes drop to her stomach.
“Three and a half months,” she answers quickly, tearing off another stretch of tape and putting up another picture. Just over a month into Peter’s captivity. Not that Pepper knew he was kidnapped at that point, but still.
Tony grimaces. “And how long since… did you know… That I…”
That he was locked up? That he wasn’t just burying himself into his work to avoid seeing her?
She sighs, turns around, and picks up another photo from Peter’s bed. “A month and a half,” she says, and she can hear the bitterness creep into her voice. One and a half months ago, Happy came to her with Peter’s friends on his tail, and they told her: Peter’s missing.
But before that?
Two months she spent without knowing what was going on. Two months she spent obsessing over why Tony had hit her, just in case she could get her baby’s father back. Two months she spent killing herself trying to figure out what she had done so wrong—to have the man hit her, to grow his baby inside of her. Two months of figuring out how to love her future child.
Two months of losing her love for Tony Stark.
She’s not trying to make him feel guilty. She’s not. She just…
They used to talk, goddamn it, they used to… They used to tell each other everything. Now she’s twenty-eight weeks pregnant, Tony’s weaning off stimulants like he’s a fucking coke addict, and the kid they used to joke about adopting is so buried in trauma that he’s tied to a bed and can hardly speak.
A long silence.
“What are we?” he asks, when they’ve finished unpacking that stupid duffel bag, “now?”
“I don’t know,” Pepper answers, because she doesn’t.
Then he leans in her direction, arm outstretched—
—and her response is automatic. She curls away from him, half-protecting her pregnant belly.
And Tony’s hand lingers in the air, goes slightly slack, and then returns to his side. “Sorry,” he says.
A sudden hate hits her, like a freight train. She snaps, “I suppose that’s what happens when you hit your fiancèe and leave her for five months.”
She’s being cruel to him—needlessly so.
But she doesn’t take it back.
Tony winces as though she’s physically struck him, and for some reason that just makes her more angry. “I had to,” he whispers, “you know that, right? I had to.”
Pepper’s already forgiven him for this—but she doesn’t want to play nice anymore. “Couldn’t have found another way to tell me to fuck off,” she spits. “Just jumped straight to domestic abuse, right?”
He looks at her with this weary fucking gaze. “I—”
“Yeah. You had to. It was the only way. I know.”
And Tony lets out this little breath of a sigh, and he tilts his head into his hands. “I’m tired, Pep,” he says quietly. “I don’t want to fight.”
It’s so unlike him to just give in like this, to bare his proverbial belly for the kill; Tony usually speaks at a mile a minute, and now…
She doesn’t know why she’s saying these things to him—maybe it’s the headache pressing at her skull or the weight of the baby pulling at her pelvis, or maybe it’s the way he keeps looking at her like she’s his saving grace— “Right,” she says coldly. “Bigger fish.”
Tony just looks at her with that sad gaze—and she can’t look at him. She can’t.
So with some minor struggle, she gets up from the chair, exits Peter’s room, and heads for the hallway.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 — 11:19 PM
Besides the residential floor he’s currently living on, Harley Keener only has access to three floors: the cafeteria floor, a recreational floor, and the Medbay—which Ms. Potts said he could access if he needed any medical help.
And no, he doesn’t need medical help.
But he’s really goddamn bored.
So on day three of his stay at Avengers Tower, Harley climbs into the elevator, hits the button for the Medbay floor, and waits for the doors to close.
The morgue up in New Hampshire sent him the electronic copies of his dad’s letters—the ones he wrote in prescription pads for days after he was captured, up until the day he was killed.
And Harley honestly can’t bring himself to read them. He keeps pulling up the files and then closing them. Harley lost his father for years of his childhood because of his alcoholism; when he was ten, the man just up and left—didn’t come back until he’d sobered up. And by that point, his mom had a new boyfriend, Harley was fourteen, and they’d figured out how to live without him. And yeah, Harley loves him, but…
He doesn’t want to think about it too much.
The elevator doors ping and then slide open with a metallic sound.
Harley’s not even properly dressed; he’s got on a pair of flannel pants, wool socks, and a black sweatshirt that some Stark Industries intern dropped off for him. He tucks his hands into his pockets and shuffles forward into the hallway.
The Medbay is a lot whiter than the other floors—white tiles, white walls. He supposes that’s how it has to be, given that it’s a medical floor. He passes a row of door-open empty rooms, and finally one with the door closed. There’s a whiteboard on the door, and in blue marker is written: May Parker.
Stepping his socked feet quietly across the floor, he pushes open the door. Inside, a woman lays on the hospital bed with her eyes closed. The woman has long dark hair, a pronounced nose, and thin brows. Maybe forty-five or fifty. A plastic tube is taped down to her mouth, connected to a nearby machine that’s pushing air in mechanical spurts— in, out, in, out.
She looks dead.
Harley doesn’t like being in there, so he exits quickly, shutting the door behind him. Back in the hallway, he passes another few empty rooms with their doors open.
At last he finds some more occupied rooms: rooms one, two, and three. He hears voices inside the third one; he peers inside to find a little bald girl sitting on a hospital bed, sleeping in her blonde mother’s arms. He remembers that kid from the plane, maybe. With the bandages wrapped around her head.
What happened to her?
He shuffles to the next door—Room Two—and he reads the name on the door, written in red dry-erase marker: PETER. No last name. Harley peers inside the door’s window.
Inside, there’s a boy sleeping beneath a patterned comforter, the sheets drawn up over his naked chest.
But he looks…
He looks like someone’s ripped him apart .
He’s covered in mutilated scarring—dark, pinkish marks cover most of the left side of his face, and down one shoulder Harley can spot these quarter-sized burns—cigarettes? It’s hard to pick out individual ones with how much the scars layer: long slashes crisscrossing over one another, short white slices over his neck.
“Oh my god, ” he whispers, mostly to himself.
There’s barely a patch of unblemished skin on the guy.
He might remember this kid from the plane, too—but he thought… Honestly, when he’d first spotted the sheet-swaddled body that Tony Stark was carrying—all skinny and pale and mutilated—he thought it was a corpse.
He’d never seen the corpse actually take a breath.
Yet here, he is. Alive and breathing, with tubes trailing from both hands and one threading beneath the comforter—a catheter, maybe.
Footsteps behind him, and Harley jumps, spinning around—it’s Captain America, and he grabs the kid by the back of his hoodie, yanks him backwards, and shoves him into the opposite wall. “Who the hell let you in here?”
“Uh,” he tries, “Ms. Potts said that I could—”
Captain America physically drags him back down the hallway, and Harley’s helpless to it, flailing helplessly as the Captain brings him back to the elevator. “Whoa, man—no one tells me what’s going on—and it’s boring up there, so—and who was that kid? What happened to him? I think I saw him on the plane—”
Captain America pushes him against the wall next to the elevator and impatiently presses the button with one hand.
“Who is he? He looks, like, really bad—”
“That,” says Captain America with a cutting tone, “is the boy your father saved. Show some respect.”
Harley shuts up. “Oh,” he says emptily. They look about the same age, although the boy—Peter, right?—seems to have been shredded on him. “What’s—what happened to him?”
Captain America grimaces then, and he answers with a who, not a what: “Charlie Keene. And his goddamn friends.”
Harley’s heard that name—Charles Keene, brother of Officer Julia Keene—drifted over the news the past couple days.
He’s heard the spiel: a police officer’s brother was a drug addict, delusional as hell, kidnapped some kids and tortured them in a dungeon or something; every news outlet is saying something different now: drug trafficking, serial killers, ransoms, neo-Nazis, sex dungeons…
And no one knows how—but somehow, Tony Stark was involved.
Captain America just shakes his head then; his bruises look better, having mostly faded since Harley last saw him. He doesn’t say anything to Harley. He just presses the lit button again with his good hand, waits for the elevator to arrive, and shoves him inside.
Harley doesn’t fight him on it. Somehow, coming down to the Medbay out of pure boredom doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.
An ache of guilt threads through his chest as the elevator doors close.