o children
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 — 10:32 AM
“We’ve got someone for him,” says Dr. Cho.
Tony looks up from where he’s seated on Peter’s hospital room floor. Did he fall asleep like this? “What?”
“You remember Sam Wilson?”
Tony blinks at her.
She shakes her head, as though clearing her mind. “Right. Yes. Well, they’re a big military family–parents were both army, Sam went into Pararescue, and his sister—Sarah—she went into psychiatry. Works with prisoners of war in the military. Sam talked to her—told her a little bit about our situation, and she’s coming in later today.”
“She’s gonna help?” he echoes, a little wary.
Dr. Cho nods. “As much as she can. WIth Peter’s…condition, it might be hard, there might not be much change, but yes. She’s well-versed in violence of this nature—and she’s done some worked with vigilantes, minor superheroes, that kind of thing. And” —she waves vaguely— “it’s Sam’s sister. So… I think she’s a safe bet.”
Sarah Wilson arrives in the afternoon, sometime after one o’clock.
She’s a dark-skinned woman with a warm face much like Sam’s. She comes dressed in a pair of maroon pants with hoop earrings, her hair in long black twists, and a copper-colored sweater. She shakes Tony’s hand first, and then Helen’s and then they explain the gist of Peter’s situation. “And how is he right now?” Sarah asks, turning to Tony.
He grimaces. “He’s…”
Was there an easy way to explain Peter’s current state? All today, Peter’s been in that fugue state of his—he might as well be sedated, because he’s basically unresponsive. He’s gone again, just gone blank; and he won’t talk to anyone. He just watches them as they move through the room, letting them do whatever they want to him—just like he did when Tony offered him food on that first day.
Sarah Wilson doesn’t betray any kind of alarm upon hearing this. She just nods calmly, and says, “Where is he?”
So they lead him to Peter’s room. He’s lying down on his back, the bed angled slightly so that he can see them as they approach. And he barely even moves as they enter, just staring blankly in their general direction.
“How much sedation did you give him?” asks Sarah Wilson, scanning the kid.
Dr. Cho answers, giving a sliding look to Tony. “He’s, well. He’s not on any sedation right now.”
Sarah nods solemnly, and she comes to him, sitting beside his bed, slow moving and careful not to frighten him. “Hi, Peter,” she says, “my name is Dr. Wilson. Sarah. I’m just here to talk—that’s all. Can you tell me your name?”
Peter stares at her; it doesn’t even seem like he’s registered her question. His eyes betray him, though — they’re more alert than the rest of him, drifting from one side of the room to the other, jerking to a person when they begin to speak.
Tony remembers, suddenly, the first time they broke Peter’s nose. The crack that Charlie’s fist made against bone, the hitched groan Peter had made, the way blood slid down—so liquid— down Peter’s neck, bright. The way he’d looked directly onto the camera—he’d still had some fight in him then—and smiled, as though to say, I’m okay, Mr. Stark. I can take it.
“Take your time, Peter.”
He does nothing but blink at her, his gaze intent on her face. He scans the room again. And again. And again.
“Do you know what day it is?” When he doesn’t answer, she brings out a calendar and taps the day in its white square: September first. “Can you tell me what day it is, Peter?”
He just looks at her.
They try a lot of others—Sarah showed him cards and asks him to say what’s on it, she asks him to try to speak and to point at things, but he’s just getting agitated, curling away from Sarah and glancing over at Tony—he’s disoriented, barely able to focus on their voices.
“Can you make a fist for me, Peter?” She demonstrates with one hand. He just stares blankly at her, and then he looks at Tony, his wrist pulling at those stupid fucking restraints. Clink. Clink. Clink.
So Sarah gives him a pen and paper.
And there’s suddenly a reaction like they haven’t seen before in Peter. He takes the pen, his fingers curling around it. It’s a nice pen—maybe twenty or twenty-five dollars—capped with a metal tip. He removes the cap with a satisfying thihk and then he looks up at Sarah as though seeing her for the first time, his brow tightening a fraction, one wrinkle forming as his eyelids twitch.
He’s thinking.
His fingers wrap around it, a four-fingered grip like a child with a crayon.
Sarah seems to understand his sudden change in demeanor, too, because then she points at the pen. “Can you tell me what that is?”
Still gripping the pen, Peter stares at her, his eyes cold beneath his dark eyebrows. His eyes flit once to Tony’s, then back to Sarah, and he jerks his arm back —
He doesn’t get very far; the restraints clank loudly, and the pen flies out of his weak hands. .
They can’t figure out what he was going to do with it. Stab Sarah Wilson? Stab himself?
If not for the restraints, they’d probably know.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 — 12:51 PM
They had a cardiologist come through—check on leftover occurrences of his cardiac issues—but with the refeeding syndrome now much in check, Peter’s safe on that front.
Pepper keeps returning to May Parker’s room; since the woman found out Peter was safe, she’d fallen into another coma. Dr. Cho keeps telling her it’s normal—that sometimes people hang on for one particular reason—like the safety of their loved ones—and then they just…decline.
Little Cassie is doing better—they’ve been letting her take monitored walks through the hallways, which helps to calm her down. Not to visit Peter, though.
And slowly, surely, Dr. Cho weans Peter completely off the sedatives, off of the anti-anxiety meds, the anti-psychotic meds, all of it. Anything that might be clouding his mind. It takes a couple days, but it works. Every day, he’s a little clearer, a little more present, a little more Peter. Sarah keeps working with him, trying to ground him using various techniques, but nothing’s working with those restraints on him.
So, Sarah Wilson offers to make a few changes to Peter’s regimen. She talks to them about a lot—but especially about removing the restraints.
“Every time I think we’re about to get there—to lucidity, to clarity,” Sarah says, referring to Peter, “he realizes he’s restrained again. And he gets obviously upset, Helen. Any child would. So, if you would please… ”
But Dr. Chow won’t have it. “It’s protocol,” says the doctor, “that when a patient as violent as Peter is in my Medbay—”
Pepper can hear them shouting in the conference room, arguing about mental states and delirium, barely able to find common ground when it comes to Peter.
So Sarah Wilson comes up with some alternative solutions.
She removes some of the photos from Peter’s ones—especially the ones in glass casing. “No reflections,” she says. “Nothing reflective."
“Why not?” Pepper asks.
Sarah winces. “Well, it might scare him.”
“What?”
The woman sighs. “Do you remember what it was like—seeing him for the first time, like this?”
She does. It was like seeing a horror movie—Peter Parker had been so badly beaten that his skin was dark with bruising, his face half-marred by knifelike marks, his ear melted away, his hair matted, his chest mauled by horrific, thick scarring. “Yeah,” she replies. “He looked bad.” Bad is a monumental understatement. “Alien. Nothing like himself.”
Sarah nods, solemn. “Exactly.”
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 — 4:22 PM
Then comes Sarah’s brilliant idea.
“We usually do this with the elderly,” she says, sitting Tony and Pepper down in a conference room. “We’ll give them, well, stuffed animals or dolls to calm them. It can help with grounding patients, too, make them remember times in their lives where they were parents or caretakers. Help them remember who they are. I think… I think we could try it for Peter.”
“I don’t understand,” says Pepper, “Peter’s not a parent—he doesn’t… He doesn’t even have any pets.”
Sarah nods. “But he had Cassie,” she says. “Remember? She was an ever-present person in his life. That’s why she keeps asking for him. And we can’t be dragging Cassie from room to room—especially with Peter’s current mental state, it’s probably better to keep them separated until we can get Peter to understand that he’s safe. So I think… Having something to hold might help ground him. ”
“Like a doll?” she asks.
Sarah shakes her head. “A doll might frighten him,” she says, “he might think it’s, well…”
It takes Pepper a moment to get it. A corpse, Sarah must’ve meant. Peter might think the doll is a corpse.
“So we’ll start with something simple. A teddy bear.”
So they get him a bear. A big one, about the size of a small child. Some of the Stark Industries engineers it to have the same warmth as a person, and another team equips it with a light, barely discernible heartbeat. It’s a sweet little kid’s bear—with closed eyes and brown fur, and Peter just stares at it when they put it on his bed, just within reach.
He doesn’t take it when they’re in the room—but once they leave for lunch and return, they find that Peter has taken it in one cuffed hand, and he’s stroking its fuzzy head in that same sleepy, gentle manner that he did to Cassie when he held her.
The kid holds the bear gently to his chest, petting and petting and making mumbly whispers into the animal’s head.
Sarah’s right. It helps.
This is the calmest they’ve seen Peter in days . Soon, it’s Tuesday, and it’s the third day of weaning Peter off his sedatives—Helen removes the last drop from his system, and at last, he is lucid. He spends most of his time just holding that teddy bear. He can only manage one arm with his restraints, but it helps nonetheless. He just touches its face and cradles it with one hand—when Peter falls asleep, it is with the bear at his side.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 — 10:35 AM
Ross is pissed.
Now that Project Manticore has crashed and burned, Thaddeus Ross has to figure out so—much—bullshit.
He wants to kill them all. He wants to shoot each of them in the head and watch them bleed out, knowing he’ll never be liable for any of this Stark-Seven-Parker bullshit.
But he needs someone to take the fall.
So he set up that little plan with Flint Marko—he got rid of any witnesses who had told anyone about his involvement, got rid of any who weren’t willing to plead guilty. Those that survived Flint’s questionnaire were given an option: keep quiet about who employed you, plead guilty, and you will be paid off for the rest of your life.
Thaddeus Ross is a fucking genius. He knows how not to get his hands dirty.
He’s convinced all of them to plead guilty to their charges—to take deals in exchange for shorter sentences and an allowance (courtesy of Ross) so that they can live out the rest of their lives comfortably.
Honestly, it wasn’t hard to convince them once they caught wind of what happened to those ungrateful soldiers. Once Flint Marko paid them a little visit and threatened their lives and the lives of their families.
The biggest problem is that there’s a line of dead in their wake. They’ve tied many, many dead bodies to this project—it’s not even his fault! It’s these fucking—moronic—junkies!
And apparently now Marko is even on the run—Banner and Thor, somehow, two of the strongest Avengers, had gotten a whiff of his presence in New York and scared him off before he could come near the kids. They were currently chasing him down somewhere in Canada—and honestly, not his problem.
Those kids are so fucked up that no one would take their testimony seriously, anyway.
And they don't know Ross was involved, right?
Right?
God, he’s so stressed.
He schedules another therapy session through his secretary, and a massage for this afternoon. He needs to relax; this court case is sending his blood pressure through the goddamn roof.
If those kids know that he paid those addicts to orchestrate Project Manticore, then he is fucked.
He could hire another hitman, but honestly, that Avengers Tower is on such heavy lockdown that even their best guys couldn’t break in.
He should have never entrusted such a massive project to a moron like Charlie Keene. He was just so easy to convince, and for so little pay, too. All of them were so easy to coerce—and all of them are now pleading guilty in his place in exchange for cash and drugs.
Well—
All except for one.
Quentin fucking Beck.
Quentin calls him later in the day from prison.
It’s a video call; apparently, one of the other convicts at Quentin’s jail got pissed and pulled all of his teeth out one by one (honestly, he’d have liked to see that happen), so he’s on a video call instead, mouth bloody and stuffed full of cotton padding, holding up a notepad to the camera.
In angry black lettering, he’s written: I DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS YOU FUCKWAD! IM NOT GOING TO PRISON FOR THIS!
Ross responds, calmly, “Well, I told you not to leave a fucking trail, Quentin. When you don’t listen—”
More frantic scribbling. YOU SAID I COULD DO WHATEVER I WANTED WITH THEM!
“I said,” Ross corrects, more pissed off now, “you could do whatever you wanted as long as the job got done and you didn’t leave a trail, and look where we are now—no gun, a goddamn trail, and a list of witnesses longer than your missing dick—all because you couldn't keep it in your pants, Quentin!”
The guy makes an angry noise through his cotton-stuffed mouth.
Normally, he’s a fan of Quentin Beck. Sure, the guy is a horny pedophile and a loose cannon, but the man’s a fucking genius, ruthless as hell, and will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Especially if the job involves Tony Stark.
So, he owes the man.
Besides, Quentin will make sure none of the other addicts say a word about him—and that’s what he needs to happen right now. The guy's currently scribbling more on his notepad, shaking it in front of the camera, but Ross waves him away. “Whatever,” he says, “I’ll figure it out, Quentin. Go get your mouth fucking fixed. I’m sending you a lawyer. Sit tight.”
And with one tap to his screen, Secretary Ross ends the call.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 — 6:17 PM
When it happens, Tony isn’t even there.
He and Pepper are in a meeting with legal about an upcoming hearing concerning the so-called Stark Seven. A man named Matt Murdock is there with them—alongside his legal partner, a blond named Foggy.
They’re pretty informal, as lawyers go, but Pepper assures him that they’re the best for this kind of case. Tony goes through the entire meeting in a daze; when he nods asleep, leaned up against the palm of his hand, he finds himself dreaming of Peter in the chair: screaming for him, crying for him, bleeding for him. And when he wakes with a jerk, both lawyers are staring at him with a horror-stricken gaze.
The meeting ends shortly after that, and Pepper vanishes to another doctor’s appointment; Tony heads back to Peter’s room. He makes his way down the Medbay hallway, trembling like a senior citizen and catching himself on the wall, forcing himself forwards and forwards and forwards.
But he finds Peter’s room empty.
Inside there is only that blonde-and-pink haired nurse, Kaelyn, who’s restocking the cabinet beside Peter’s bed with medications. “Where is he?” he chokes out, and the panic is already there, draped over him like a weighted blanket.
The woman is calm—much more collected than Tony—and she explains that they’ve taken him down the hall for a couple scans.
So he heads for the scanning room, using his hand to guide himself down the wall until he has to stop and that blonde nurse helps him back up. “Would you like a wheelchair, sir?” she asks, concern flashing across her face.
Tony shakes his head. “I’ve got it,” he says, even though he very much doesn’t.
“Okay,” she says, but she doesn’t leave him. “Want some company, then?”
Tony slumps, exhausted, against the wall. He feels, suddenly, that saying yes would be something terrible, and he just stays there, hands trembling, knees wobbling, so weak that he can barely get a word out.
And although Tony doesn’t respond, the nurse helps him anyway, draping one tattooed arm around his waist and helping him to his feet. He leans on her heavily, but she’s strong—they walk together, all the way down to the end of the hallway. He doesn’t even get a chance to thank her before she’s headed back towards Peter’s room.
It seems they’ve just finished with the scans, because as soon as Tony arrives, they’re pulling the sample table out in one long, mechanical pull, and Peter’s on it, laid still on his back. “I’m here,” he says, slightly out of breath. “I’m here, kiddo, I’m…”
That’s when he sees it—as the table pulls out all the way, extending fully with a click , he can see now Peter’s face. His face is held still by a foam-lined plastic structure, one strap extending across his forehead, two foam pads pressed on either side. Another plastic frame presses flat against his chest, pinning his shoulders down. But the worst is—that Peter’s eyes are mostly closed, only a sliver of white visible. His thin body is wholly, entirely slack, the only sign of life the trail of a shiny tear extending down one side of his face.
Tony’s chest twists. “What…” he says, unable to finish his sentence.
He looks up at the glass windows on the opposite wall—there’s Dr. Cho and her technicians, speaking to each other, hands gesturing as they talk.
She—she drugged him again.
God, he’s gonna fucking kill that woman.
One nurse begins to unstrap Peter from his various plastic contraptions, carefully sliding his head from between the foam pads and flashing a light across his eyes.
The kid’s pupils shrink to pinpricks at the light, and his eyes water, shiny with liquid, another tear sliding down the side of his face. “He’s crying,” Tony whispers. “You’re—you’ve—he’s crying—”
They sedated him again. They sedated him again—to such an extent that even his eyes are slow, rolling lethargically in their sockets, tears rolling down his temples where he lies.
“That can happen,” says the nurse carefully, touching his arm. “Sir, why don’t you wait outside?”
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 — 6:32 PM
Tony wants to light the Medbay on fire.
“What did I say about—about sedating him?” He has this sudden and sick desire—to make Cho hurt , he wants to take a knife to her cheek, wants to chain her to the bed and drug her past recognition so that she can see how this fucking feels—
“Tony, he was really agitated when we got to him—”
“I SAID WE WERE DONE WITH THAT SHIT! NO MORE DRUGS! NONE!” Tony shoves his hand into his face. “ God, we made so much PROGRESS!”
“Would you rather I left his heart unchecked? If you haven’t forgotten, Tony, that’s something you need to live! Something Peter needs to live!”
“Stop it,” says Tony, “stop! That’s—that’s—he’s scared, Helen! You’re scaring him!”
“I have no choice, Tony! No choice! And his brain, we needed a proper scan, the damage done there was astronomical— ”
“No,” he says, the word vicious. “No more. No more drugs.” He’s pointing at her labcoat—the sight of her suddenly sickens him. God, that look on Peter’s face. “No. More. Next time you—you—drug up my kid against his will, I'm gonna—I’ll fire you.”
Helen stares soberly at him. “You don’t employ me,” she says, curtly. “Pepper does.”
And that vicious feeling bubbles up in Tony, that protectiveness he knows so well from watching that television every day for five months. “Fuck you,” he growls. “This is your fault! You’re—you’re torturing him!”
“Tony—”
“Aren’t you supposed to be a—a good doctor?”
“I am a good doctor,” she says. “I’m—I’m doing my best.”
“Then why is my kid—why is he—why is he—” He’s gasping then, pressing his hand into his belly to try to get some air—and when Cho reaches for him, he slaps her hand away. “Why is he—still—so— scared?”
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 — 1:39 AM
Peter wakes up in the middle of the night screaming.
Blood. Curdling. Screaming.
When the nurses find him, he’s thrashing so hard that he’s broken through the cast on his knee again, his leg kicking so hard that the bone of his shin seems to have shifted.
His eyes are open wide and his mouth is open wider and he’s screaming like someone’s prying his chest open—tears streaming down his face, thrashing left and right and left and right—
The nurse scramble around him, trying to pin him down, but he just keeps screaming—it’s something incoherent—interspersed with a sudden yell of pain, like an animal that’s just been shot, and he’s screeching, and there’s only one word that comes out clearly: “NO, no no no— ” and he’s flailing and kicking and the sounds from him like something savage —
And then—
—a—
—snap.
The nurses explain in contained horror, and then Dr. Cho explains it to Tony.
“He broke his wrist,” says Helen, with this drab look of pale upset, “trying to get out of his restraints.”
Tony’s face goes cold.
“Both the ulna,” she says, “and the radius. Completely snapped in half.” She swallows. “And his leg—he really messed it up—”
“He messed up?” echoes Tony, feeling sick. “ He messed up? You broke his goddamn arm—”
The woman swallows. “We’re gonna fix it. We’re gonna fix this, Tony.”
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 — 3:11 AM
They’re in the conference room again.
“—because of restraints you put him in!” snaps Pepper.
The only ones missing are Thor and Bruce (still chasing down the Sandman) and Tony, who’s of course at Peter’s bedside. The rest are circled around a conference room table—and at each other’s throats. Again.
“I don’t understand how this happened, ” says Rhodey, stepping up to Helen Cho, who nervously takes a step back. “God—how did this—wasn’t he restrained in the bunker?”
Bucky Barnes tilts his chin up. He’s still got some remnants of dark paint on his face, ghosted around the eyes, running down his cheeks like eyeliner in the rain. “HYDRA restraints are cuffs, not straps,” the Soldier says, his voice very still. “Immovable. Can’t get enough momentum to break a bone.”
Pepper tries not to think about how Bucky Barnes knows that information; her eyes drift to his wrists, where his shirt is rolled up to the elbow. Wrinkled circles of scars—discolored against his pale skin, in the same spot that Peter now has bandaged on either forearm.
And he’s right—the Medbay restraints are definitely different—a chain attached to a leather, vibranium-reinforced strap buckled around his wrists and ankles with about a foot of slack for each limb. Enough to move—but not enough to reach his nasogastric tube or his IV on either side.
“He’s strong enough now—” explains Helen, but there’s sweat lining her hairline. “His power’s been returning without the sedatives—I didn’t think—”
Clint’s standing now, piping up: “You didn’t think? You didn’t think about the fact that this kid’s strong enough to break his own bones? ”
“I didn’t know—this has never happened before—and the state of his bones, I—I forgot that with the malnutrition, they’re brittle—”
Like always, Nat’s on Clint’s side, echoing, “You forgot?”
Cho’s backing up by the screen, looking progressively more worried, her throat bobbing as she swallows. “You—you said—it was daily, the torture—he must be—he’s just scared, there’s no way I could have known—”
“Of course you knew! He’s tied down! You tied him down, of course he’s scared—”
Then Rhodey is stepping between the pair and Cho, and he's still as intimidating without his mechanical suit. His leg braces whir quietly as he moves forward. “Don’t come at her—this isn’t her fault—”
“Oh, and it’s mine?”
“Yes,” he spits, with a spite she’s never before seen from the man. “It is. We wouldn’t even be here if—if you and Barnes hadn’t done — your fucking — jobs!”
Natasha smacks his pointing finger away. “Blame me all you want,” she says coldly. “There has not been a single sign of HYDRA activity in the past two years in the continental United States—Barnes and I took them out, you know that, they’re not coming back—”
“Right, because Nazis need your permission to band together again—”
“These weren’t Nazis!”
“Then who? Then who?” He slaps his hands against his thighs and sits down, because his gaze turns to Pepper. “Because there’s no way a gang of junkies from Queens managed to pull this shit on Peter. He’s enhanced. He could heal a broken bone overnight. I’ve seen him lift a jet bridge —those things weigh, like, twenty tons. And you’re telling me—they did all of this?”
“Forget them,” says Nat, “what I wanna know is how Pepper fucking Potts, CEO of the biggest tech conglomerate in the fucking country—didn’t know that these guys had ahold of Peter—I thought he was like your nephew!”
The room turns to her.
“Intern,” Pepper says curtly, something cold growing inside of her chest, “and I’m not his mother—”
“This is a child,” says Nat, her tone vicious. “A seventeen-year-old child. A high school student. And you’re telling me that he and his caretaker disappeared off the face of the earth overnight and you just thought—what, that they went on an extra-long vacation?”
“No,” says Pepper, taking a step back. “I—”
“If you’d noticed sooner,” she says, “then we might not be having this conversation; we might be speaking to Peter instead of pumping him with so much sedation that he can barely breathe on his own!”
“Happy said he was talking to them!”
“I TOLD YOU!” Happy shouts. “I told you they were emailing me.”
Natasha spits, “You didn’t bother. Either of you—you didn’t even try. And now Peter Parker has paid the price for your negligence—”
They’re exhausted. they’re all exhausted.
And it’s tainting their words, like a drop of ink in water in a pan.
“Not to mention the fact that you stood in front of the entire world this morning and told them what happened to Peter!”
Pepper’s face goes cold—the room’s so focused on her that she feels faint. “It’s just—speculation—” she says, but she remembers what she said. They asked her about sex trafficking, and she’d floundered, dancing around the question. Well, she’d said, and she’d suddenly become so stupid. There was—There were some signs of—well— And Rhodey, thank God, had cut her off before she said something else.
She hadn't said anything. She hadn't.
She'd just... messed up. “Speculation doesn’t matter—”
“Of course it fucking matters!” says Natasha, stalking closer to her. “It matters, Pepper! You told the world about something deeply personal—and when Peter wakes up, he’s gonna find out exactly what the public knows about him!” She’s got a remote in her hand, and she slams a couple buttons with her small fingers, turning on the television mounted in the corner. A news channel pops up: FOX, and there’s a man speaking with an old picture of Tony on the screen. “And this is what he’s going to see—so what the hell were you thinking saying that, Pepper? How could you do that to Peter?”
Like a cornered dog, Pepper backs up, finding the wall with her hands. “I had to—had to give them something—the media—they’re vultures! They would’ve found out somehow—”
“You had no right saying that about him!” snarls Steve, butting in to the conversation. “His business is his and his alone! ”
Somehow, Captain America reaming her out in her own building is the thing that sets her off. “If you knew about it,” says Pepper harshly, shakily, stabbing one finger in the supersoldier’s direction, “then why didn’t you say anything when he first got to the hospital? You were just going to let it go?” The supersoldier’s face looks suddenly different—colder. “Didn’t you think we deserved to know? What kind of superhero does that?”
Steve Rogers’ face hardens. “Fuck you,” he snaps, his voice icelike, and Pepper reels; she’s never heard Captain America use that kind of language.
But still she presses on, trying to push the attention away from herself and that fucking press conference. “What happened to you in there, huh?” she presses on. “Why wouldn’t you just tell us? What did you do in there that you’re so afraid to tell everyone else?”
Steve gives her this hard, hard look.
And then he just walks out of the room.
Bucky turns to her with such a vicious glare—his eyes still ringed in black—that she is at once afraid for her well-being. Pepper takes a step back, her heart skipping a beat, and puts a hand over her swollen stomach.
And he follows Steve out.
And even without the two supersoldiers, they just keep arguing—fighting and fighting and fighting—until Nat’s screaming at Pepper, and Sam Wilson’s looking mealy and sick again. Clint’s asking rows and rows of questions to Dr. Cho, and Rhodey’s physically cornered Happy and is pressing his hand to the man’s shoulder to pin him back against the wall.
They’re all shouting—they’re all exhausted and worried and scared and really, really pissed about the whole situation.
Clint’s shouting at Cho, something about, “You’re a doctor! Fix this!”
And then Dr. Helen Cho—fucking— snaps.
“SHUT—UP!”
The entire room turns on its head; every Avenger turns their head to look at the dark-haired doctor, at the South Korean physician who has taken care of all of them for the past four years—who has never yelled—never shouted—never screamed.
And now she looks like a creature unhinged—her hair completely free of its clip, her labcoat wrinkled and stained, her face pink with upset. “I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS BEFORE! This is—this is—without a doubt—the worst case I’ve seen in my entire life and I work for the god—damn—Avengers!”
She throws down the manila file she’s been holding since the start, and she starts pointing around the room at the each of them, pacing the front, her steps hard and angry. “And despite what you all might think, I’m not a robot! I’m not JARVIS, I’m not FRIDAY—I’m not a bottomless fucking pit of medical information and psychiatric advice—I’M A GODDAMN HUMAN BEING AND I MAKE MISTAKES! And I feel this as much as any of you do!” She cuts her hand through the air to accentuate her point, and her hair falls stray in front of her face as she paces. “And I don’t just see his current injuries. I see every single injury he’s ever had. YOU—YOU ONLY SEE THE PAST TWO WEEKS—I’M LOOKING AT HIS SCANS, HIS BLOOD TESTS, HIS HISTORY—AT MONTHS OF— MONTHS OF—”
She cuts herself off.
And in a low voice shuddery with anger, she says: “Have you seen his goddamn X-ray?”
The entire room is in a trembling silence.
Cho taps angrily on her tablet; on the projector screen at the other side of the room, a black-and-white scan lights up: a glowing white skeleton in a shroud of dark. It’s definitely Peter—the way his skin and muscle barely lines his bones is a dead giveaway. The gruesome, shattered mess of his knee. The missing tip of his pinky finger.
And then Helen Cho starts to tap at her tablet again, highlighting each spot in red—cracks and cracks and cracks. Blurred lines where the bones have healed back together. Jagged points of mismatched bone where it healed wrong.
Until his entire X-ray lights up like a Christmas tree: multiple fractures curving through his pelvis, minor fractures crawling down his spine. Toes crushed that healed back together. Calves split slightly wrong. Cracks in his jaw that haven’t quite healed yet. Dents in his wrists, fissures spiraling through his hands, his ribs so broken-and-rehealed that one side is healed diagonal—bent inwards.
And Cho’s naming all of them like it’s a damn grocery list.
Clavicle. Scapula. His tibia and fibula, all the way through in one long split—long healed and blurry with bone calluses. His fucking femur—the strongest bone in the whole body, and there’s healed remnants of two cracks there that go all the way through.
“Do you see this?” she says, stabbing her finger at the screen, at some minor dents in his radius and ulna. “His restraints—they got all the way to bone. Bone. He had so little muscle and fat there that it wore at his goddamn bone. Damaged the fuck out of his veins—and it’s only because he’s enhanced that he’s not dead.”
And then she draws one long highlight of a circle around one spot on the boy’s head, and then the projector zooms in on the spot as Cho spreads two fingers on the tablet. “And do you see this? You see this? They fractured his skull— twice. Do you know how much force it takes to crack open a human skull like this? Do you? DO YOU?”
She presses her hand to her face—Helen is crying. Dr. Helen Cho is crying. “And his skin— god, there’s so much scarring, he… He…” She shakes her head, and she’s turning to the wall like she’s trying to hide her tears. “Some of them—the stitches, they’re all wrong, they’re all diagonal, and he—” She’s crying a little harder now, her voice going to that croaky, shaky place. “They’re pulled—diagonally—towards him. Towards himself. He—he—” she sobs. “He stitched up those wounds himself. ”
Pepper’s seen them. She has. Some of the kid’s scars are surrounded by clean and professional lines—probably done by that doctor who died. But others… Others are ragged, all wonky and sideways. That angle… She’d never noticed. The kid stitched up his own body by himself.
What did he even use? Surely they didn’t give him medical thread? How did he…
Pepper has to sit down; she feels sick, dizzy with what she knows—with what she thinks she knows.
Dr. Cho presses a hand to her face, wiping away at the tears there. “I—I'm going to fix this,” she says, her eyes bloodshot now. “I will. But…” And then Helen Cho looks pointedly at Pepper, her eyes round and dark. “When this is over,” she says, and she lets out this shaky sigh. “I’m going on a fucking vacation.”
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 — 3:56 AM
Dr. Cho removes his restraints that night.
There are red, irritated marks where the straps once were—the skin worn away by the metal-reinforced fabric. That kind of consistent pulling that Peter was doing—it was so slow, so persistent that the wounds didn’t bleed. They just wore at the skin, layer and layer until the skin kind of liquidated, bloodless, scabbing over with some yellowish-brownish color. It’s heavy on his good leg, the scab going all the way around, so one of the nurses applies an ointment and more bandaging to it. Now his legs, horribly, kind of match. Two bandaged legs.
Tony spends the rest of the night with Peter. Helen gives him a new drug—a muscle relaxant, something that will weaken him so he won’t hurt himself, but won’t pull away from his mental state.
And without the straps pinning him down, Peter Parker’s curled into a ball in the middle of the bed on his side, sleeping, shuddering, sweating through the pain.
Pepper thinks, then, of how many people have been affected by Peter’s kidnapping. Tony, isolated from all other people in his lab. Cassie, taken from her home kitchen. Scott Lang, forced to film the torture and then killed with such a blast that there wasn’t even a body to bury. May Parker, left in a months-long coma. Dr. Leonard Skivorski, kidnapped from his job and forced to operate on tortured children, shot in the head as he tried to save a kid. Harley Keener, left fatherless, his dad’s body so unrecognizable that the first autopsy couldn’t identify him. Steve Rogers, beaten so badly that they had to call a plastic surgeon to consult about his face.
She and Tony are still on edge after their last argument, and when she enters Peter’s room, Tony doesn’t even notice that she’s entered. Pepper supposes he must be used to it—hallucinating figures moving in and out of his lab just to have someone to talk to.
He’s speaking to the kid, who’s very asleep, breathing in soft pants. “You never used to look at him like that,” she says.
Tony doesn’t say anything.
“Maybe a little—that time he got shot, or that night in May, but… Never like this.”
Without even turning to look at her, Tony rubs his finger over Peter's knuckles; his fingertips brush the bandages around Peter's wrist. And he says, quietly, “The things I’ve seen, Pepper…”
She swallows. She wants to apologize for earlier, but she can’t find the words inside of her to do so.
And Tony stays with him.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 — 5:48 AM
Tony nods off at some point, and the next time that he wakes up, Peter is watching him.
The kid is sitting up in the middle of the bed, legs pulled close to his chest; Tony can’t imagine how much pain his knee is in for him to bend it like that.
The kid’s just watching him. and Tony just sits there—he knows now not to touch him, not to move towards him, just to stay still and quiet. “Mr. Stark,” Peter says quietly, without any prompt.
He wants to dive to the kid, and has to physically prevent himself from doing so in case he scares the kid. “Yeah,” he says, “Yeah, kid, it’s me. I'm here.”
And he’s moving oddly, weakly—that muscle relaxant is no joke, so his wrists (one casted, one skinny and bandaged) drape around his knees, slack. Peter whispers, mutters to himself in slurred words.
“It’s me,” Tony tries again, “It’s Mr. Stark.”
Peter doesn’t really respond to that, just staring at him with this dulled gaze, and eventually, when the stretch of time becomes painfully long, Tony swallows, and he says, “Peter.”
And the kid’s so obviously confused and he’s looking at him like he’s never seen a person in his life. “Tony,” he says.
“Yes,” says Tony.
“Tony,” Peter says again.
“Yes, buddy, yes.”
He’s just like before: quiet, jumpy, afraid. But he just keeps holding that teddy bear close to his chest, like the way a mother would hold a newborn baby. His fingers twitch lightly over the bear’s head, stroking. “Where,” he whispers, and he doesn’t say anything else.
All Tony wants to do is come closer. All he wants to do is soothe some of those whispers from his mind, to alleviate the questions he knows are wracking Peter’s mind. To touch his arm, to hold his hand, to touch his face, to comb back the hair from his eyes.
Peter’s still hugging that stuffed bear, so tender and gentle, his face turned into the bear’s, his arms guarding it as best he can. Tony doesn’t dare mention it—for fear the Peter realizes the bear in his arms is nothing but a toy, before he realizes that it’s not Cassie pressed warm against his front.
So he doesn’t say anything about her. Instead, he answers the kid’s question, saying, “You’re at the Tower, Pete. The Medbay. You’re in the Medbay.”
He mumbles a little more, whispering into the bear’s furry ear, pulling up his knees a little and gasping at the pain of it. “Careful,” says Tony, and Peter looks up at him again, as if just remembering he was there.
The kid blinks at him—slow, muddled blinks—and then glances to the door, then back to Tony.
Peter clearly doesn’t understand.
Although, it makes sense. Pile on months of brutal trauma, starvation, and abuse, combined with near-constant drugging, extreme pain, and restraints—and you’d get a really, really confused kid. And Peter just whispers, so fucking quiet, “Help us.”
Tony thinks he mishears him the first time.
“You’re safe,” he says, an ache pressing at his chest, and he wishes for once that he could get through Peter’s thick skull with this one—but Pete’s always been a stubborn kid. A sweet, stubborn, smart, incredible whirlwind of a kid. “You’re out of there, kid.”
Peter just stares at him.
“Peter,” he says, “you understand what I’m saying to you?” He’s afraid of saying Charlie’s name out loud, or even the word bunker, because he’s trying not to frighten him. “We—we got you out.”
Just barely, just barely, the kid shakes his head.
His eyes seem to still on his bed, on his blanket , the ones displaying Star Wars-themed blueprints. Peter releases one hand from the bear and places his hand on it, spreads his fingers over it, touching it like he’s holding gold instead of a year-old blanket. He whispers something, and it’s so quiet that Tony doesn’t catch it: “Mine,” he whispers.
“Yeah,” Tony says, and he might cry if this goes on any longer, “yeah, kiddo, that’s yours. That’s all—all yours.”
Peter’s eyes go back and forth—blanket to Tony, Tony to the blanket. “Where,” he says again, his voice cracking. “Where…”
“The Medbay,” he says, desperate, and Peter’s eyes flick around the room. “You’re in the Medbay. You remember, Pete? See?” He points to the door, where they had Peter’s name written on it, just like it has been dozens of times before. “Come on, you gotta recognize it, right? You recognize” — me? do you recognize me, Pete?— “this place, don’t you?”
Peter has released the blanket and now is hugging the bear like a little kid—maybe it was his pleading tone or his pointing finger. His hands are shaking, trembling, plastic tubing still threading from both of them.
“I’m sorry,” Tony says, dropping his voice to a whisper. “I didn’t mean to—to scare you, buddy. I’m here. I’m here, Peter. Godfather, remember? Godfather.”
The kid looks at him, his pale, scarred face tucking into the bear’s, and those hollow brown eyes seem to fill with tears. “God—father,” he says again, and he ducks his head as soon as he’s said it, squeezing his eyes shut into crinkled cracks, tears sliding down his cheeks. “No, no, no…”
“Yes,” says Tony, and now he’s crying, too, tears coming out shaky and hot down his face, running into his grayed beard. “Yes—yes. It’s me, buddy. I got you out. We’re out, Pete. We’re out. ”
“Out,” Peter echoes, a raspy wisp of a word. He glances to the door, and his face twists, his whole face wrung with timid, upset confusion, and this time his voice cracks: “Tony….”
Tony wants to hold him. He wants to hold this kid and never let him go. He wants to gather the kid’s broken limbs, his lost finger, his scarred face, all of it—wants to gather him into his arms and hold him like he did on the jet, rock him to sleep, to shush him and stroke the hair away from his forehead, tuck his head into the crook of his neck until he’s calm again.
He wants to hold him.
But Tony stays there in his chair, barely a foot or two from Peter, and tries not to frighten him again. “I’m here,” he says, soft as he can manage, unshed tears aching in his throat while more come down his face, “I’m here, Pete… I'm right here. We made it out of there. We're safe. You're safe.”
And the kid’s whispering to himself again, muttering into the bear’s head like he’s trying to reassure himself: something about Cassie, something about Charlie. More whispers. His arms tighten around the bear like he’s protecting it, and he squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them like he’s expecting Tony to vanish.
“It’s me,” Tony says, and when he leans forward, the kid cowers before him, cringing so hard that his eyes close. “Just me, buddy." Just me. Just me. "There’s nothing to be scared of, it’s just me.”
But then Peter opens his eyes again; and he blinks, almost in surprise, and then his face twists again, his face screwing up like an upset toddler, and he shakes his head. His neck is so thin, covered in those pale white lines from where Charlie held that knife to him, and with one hand Peter cups it. And then slowly, sleepily, the kid rubs his neck, scratches his neck, touches his mouth, and then presses one hand into his eyes, rubbing them with his knuckles one by one.
It’s such a Peter movement, something he used to do whenever he was tired, whenever he’d stayed over for too long and needed to, whenever he was exhausted after patrol or falling asleep on the couch. Whenever it was past his bedtime.
At that thought, Tony can’t help the tears that come.
“Tony,” the kid says again, and he’s fucking shaking again, hugging the bear like it’s his baby, “Tony, Tony…”
“Yeah,” he responds quickly, too quickly, “I’m right here, buddy…”
And in a croaky voice, barely loud enough to be intelligible, Peter hugs that teddy bear and speaks again. “You said…” Peter whispers, his voice this haunting rasp. “I… could call…you Tony…”
Tony feels like he might cry. “I sure did, buddy, I sure did.” It’s the longest sentence he’s heard the kid say since he got out of that hellhole, and it’s the sweetest thing he’s ever heard— like the rush of the ocean in a seashell, like the crackling of an open fire, like the gentle hum of an orchestra, like a dozen songbirds in perfect harmony. “You can call me whatever you want.”
And Peter nods, and his face bubbles up into a sob—his eyebrows sloping, his eyes closing, his whole body curling up, going small and tight. “Tony,” he whispers again, and he sobs with something like relief, into the bear’s damp fur. “ Tony…”