doomsday, pt 3
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 4:40 PM
Maggie is not used to her new daughter.
That’s how she keeps thinking of Cassie: new. Maggie has spent every waking moment since Cassie was born worrying about her, thinking about her, getting to know her. Her quirks and facial expressions, her favorite foods and her hobbies. Which stuffed toys to line up on the bed every night. Which bedtime stories she liked the most. What she puts on her ice cream, her favorite songs, the way she likes her eggs.
(Liked, Maggie thinks suddenly. Her daughter only eats eggs one way now — with her hands, out of an aluminum can.)
Now all of it—all of it—has been wiped clean from her. Her new daughter doesn’t sing, barely plays, and refuses to eat unless Peter Parker tells her it’s okay first. Cassie used to play soccer at the park with Scott; she used to read picture books at school and watch Curious George on Sunday mornings; she used to act like a kid. And now…
Now Cassie refuses to touch the books they gift her. Now she shrinks away from the voices on the television. Now she spends her Sunday mornings hiding behind Peter Parker or sulking in corners or gnawing at the skin of her fingertips like she’s hungry for more. Now, Maggie’s daughter has a solemnity to her, a sobriety that Maggie doesn’t recognize. She’s careful and quiet and wary of everyone—a habit Maggie is only used to seeing in adults.
She grew up in there. Five months now, and Maggie’s daughter has grown.
It’s been about four hours since Stark left with Peter and the others; now, there’s only a few of them left in the Medbay. Maggie and Jim, some Medbay staff, and Cassie’s therapist. Others flit in and out of the Medbay, too—some of Pepper’s staff, a couple security guards—but in general, the floor is empty.
The first hour wasn’t so bad. As soon as Peter was gone, Cassie scooted herself all the way back against the wall with her blanket drawn around her. Then she was quiet as usual, counting like she typically does around seven o’clock.
(Maggie doesn’t have to be a cop or a doctor or a psychiatrist to understand what that means. Every day at seven, Peter Parker was taken away from her. And every day around seven, Cassie always starts counting.)
So for that first hour, her new daughter counts aloud—and keeps counting until she reaches a thousand, and even then she keeps going. “...three hundred forty-five… one-thousand, three-hundred, forty-six…” She keeps her eyes squeezed closed and her ears shut—her hand pressed to one ear, her shoulder shoved against the other.
Jim tries to coax her out of the corner with toys and snacks. He spends nearly half-an-hour on his knees waving a stuffed beluga (one of her old toys, another thing Cassie refuses to touch), but their daughter only cowers away from him and counts faster. He keeps trying, though, and Cassie ignores him, counting in hushed, even whispers. Like a ritual. “Cassie,” Jimt tries again. “Look who it is? You remember this guy, right?” He wiggles the beluga a little too hard, and Cassie curls up tighter into her blanket and whispers faster. “Right?”
He leans forward and touches the stuffed animal to Cassie’s leg—she lets out a small scream, throwing the blanket at him and flattening herself against the wall.
“Jim,” Dr. Alexis says, touching her hand lightly to his back. “Jim, let her be.”
Maggie’s husband gives a pained look at their daughter—a look that, for a pang of a moment, reminds her of Scott—and drops the toy next to Cassie. “I don’t understand why she does that,” Jim says, as all three of them back away from Cassie’s spot in the corner. “She’s not there anymore. She doesn’t… She doesn’t have to…”
“She doesn’t know that,” Dr. Miranda says, and Maggie watches as her daughter continues to count with her eyes closed.
So they leave her like that for the first hour, and the second, too, letting her calm herself with the counting. She pays remarkable attention to each number, reaching two thousand and then three, and somewhere around four thousand things start to go downhill. From the other side of the room, Maggie and Jim watch as Cassie’s counting slows—their little girl peeks her eyes open, glances around the room, and then shuts them again, restarting with some stilted counting before opening her eyes again.
She blinks a couple times—and then she looks over at the door.
The psychiatrist tries, “Cassie? What’s the matter?”
Cassie glances with horror around the room, eyes wide, claps her good hand over her mouth, and muffles a cry into her palm. Her face is a little shiny, and she squeezes her eyes shut again.
(Maggie forgot that Cassie did this, the way she did when they first saw her in that New Hampshire hospital. The silent crying. Like a faucet on—tears slipping unbidden down her daughter’s sunless face.)
Her little girl is crying.
Silently, like someone taught her not to cry aloud. It’s everything Maggie can do not to launch herself at her daughter and gather her in her arms—but she’s tried that before. Cassie doesn’t do well with sudden movements—any movements, really.
Maggie expects her to get louder—but instead her new daughter only gets quieter—each like that, her sobbing in silent, gut-heaving gasps, and Jim keeps reaching out to Cassie and stopping himself, reaching out and stopping himself. She shuts her eyes and opens them several times, and Alexis tries again, picking up the toy zebra from the floor where Jim had dropped it in some attempt to get Cassie’s attention. “We can play with your zebra, we can play with your Legos… Which one do you want to do?”
As the minutes pass, Cassie eventually stops crying. The sobs turn to hiccups, the cries to sniffles, and soon enough she’s not crying at all anymore.
Somehow, this is worse. The not-crying. Cassie’s eyes look glazed, her hands come away from her ears, and she blinks at the door on the other side of the room. She’s not whispering anymore—she’s not saying anything at all. “Cassie,” Maggie tries, “Cassie, sweetheart, can you look at Mommy?”
Cassie doesn’t even glance at her. Her face hardens like she’s frozen, the tears still shining on her cheeks, her arms clasped tightly around herself. She’s barely blinking, her teary eyes focused beyond them to the door. “Cassie?” Jim calls out, and their daughter doesn’t respond, taking in another shuddery breath. “Honey?”
This isn’t normal.
Even for her new daughter, this isn’t normal.
“Dr. Miranda,” her husband says sharply, but the woman seems a bit frozen, too, closing her open mouth. “Dosomething!”
Maggie supposes even psychiatrists have their limits.
This whole day has been a lot—several photos from the trial have already surfaced—of Peter Parker in a dark hoodie ushered into the courthouse, of a ragged Tony Stark and a heavily pregnant Pepper Potts. The media’s going batshit for it. There’s even a new photo of Steve Rogers that the news is raving about: Captain America & the Stark Seven — Rescuer? Accomplice? The therapist blinks a couple of times, and then kneels in front of Maggie’s daughter, and says, “Cassie—Cassie, hey, you want to play a game?”
Her arms curl around herself—she doesn’t seem to hear any of their suggestions.
They can only watch as Alexis tries to get her attention again. “Cassie—Cassie, let’s play a game, okay? What, um…”
What did Peter always play with her?
Maggie’s used to hearing their little games, if she can call them that. Pretend games and guessing games, school games and spying games… But there’s one they play more than the rest. Why can’t she remember…
Then Maggie can see it clearly in her mind—Peter and Cassie sitting in the grass on the rooftop—her daughter’s head tipped into the boy’s arm, Cassie poking into his arm, saying, Your turn—and Maggie blurts out, “Pizza.”
The psychiatrist looks up—and realization dawns on her face, and she sits back on her heels. “Sushi,” she says, and Maggie nods. “Okay, Cassie, it’s your turn, right?”
“Your turn, baby,” Maggie echoes. “Cassie…”
Her little girl blinks a couple times; her face is still wet from all the crying, but her mouth stays closed. She’s so still and so quiet—and she has this empty look in her eyes still that a seven-year-old should not have. “Cassie,” she tries again, and her voice strains a little higher, a little more desperate. “Come on, baby…”
Still nothing.
But beside her, Jim kneels on the tiled Medbay floor. Cassie barely acknowledges him, her dark eyes still on the door, but Jim knows the game, too. Like Maggie, he’s heard those kids play it a thousand times. “Um,” her husband says, swallowing thickly, “Ice cream.”
Cassie sniffs and looks up at him with watery eyes. “Ice cream doesn’t count,” she whispers.
“Is that right?” Jim asks, and Maggie watches her husband inch, carefully, just a little bit closer. Slow enough not to startle her, gentle enough to get close. “Why’s that, honey?”
“It has to—it has to be a meal,” she whispers. “Peter says.”
“He does?”
Cassie nods, and her chin rests atop her knees.
“Okay,” Jim says, “okay, a cheeseburger then—does that count?”
“Yeah.”
Maggie shuffles forward on her knees, a little closer to Jim and a little closer to her daughter. “Now it’s your turn, honey,” she says.
Cassie grasps onto Jim’s shirt sleeve and presses her face into it; the man stiffens as Cassie hugs his arm, and she sniffles and finally murmurs into his jacket sleeve: “Ramen.”
One hundred and seventy days ago—almost six months—when Cassie was taken from them, her favorite food was ramen. She asked for it the day she was taken; Maggie had bought all of the ingredients. Soft-boiled eggs, sliced up a bowlful of green scallions, and a few healthy slices of broiled pork. No bamboo shoots, because Cassie hated them, but she’d bought some for herself and for Jim.
They should’ve gone out for dinner,s he thinks. They should’ve gone to Scott’s, should’ve gone anywhere, anything but what ended up happening that April afternoon.
Now, Maggie didn’t care if Cassie didn’t want her vegetables. She’d feed her ice cream for breakfast and ramen every night for dinner if only it wasn’t in a can. Now, she didn’t care if Cassie didn’t go to bed on time—on the off chance that she slept peacefully through the night.
“With the noodles…” Her daughter sniffs again. “And the… the eggs…”
But maybe Maggie’s daughter is still in there.
Maybe she’s still Cassie.
They play this game for a while longer, taking turns, and as they do Cassie grows more relaxed, talking more each time and hugging Jim’s arm. She looks at him now the way she used to: without any fear at all. Her face looks weary, the way a child’s shouldn’t. She looks like she’s in pain—like she’s used to being in pain.
“He’s—he was—” she mumbles, once the game dies out. “He’s gone. A really long time.”
Maggie says mm-hm and gives a worried glance to Jim.
“He’s dead,” Cassie adds, and her voice weakens under the strain of the word.
Her new daughter has jumped to this conclusion a few times before—like on that first day, when she promptly proclaimed that Peter’s hospital-prone body was a corpse. Maggie’s never heard her daughter talk about the dead. She’s never lost anyone before. Not a grandparent, not a pet, no one.
Did she see people die in that bunker?
That’s what the police report had said. That she’d watched a man bleed out on the floor of that six-by-nine foot cell. That one of the other captors had been beaten to death just a couple feet from her daughter—that’s the body they pulled out of Lake Champlain all those months ago. Nearly a dozen dead, someone had said, and Cassie had been there for it all.
Did Peter tell her that he was going to die? Maybe that’s why Cassie kept saying it out loud. Maybe Peter told her he was gonna die soon—and that she would, too.
There’s a sick, twisted feeling in Maggie’s stomach, and she steps back. She can’t help but imagine it, and it comes quickly, like a wave of nausea—
—Cassie in that underground room: lying beneath the bed with her hands over her ears, hair long and matted, all alone, counting the moments as they pass. Ever so often, her little girl opening her eyes to find the room empty. Looking around to discover four cement walls and a locked door. Searching for a window. Searching for someone to help. Searching for her parents. Her only companions the rattling radiator and a tortured teenage boy, with only hunger to wake her and tuck her in at night.
Her sweet dark-haired daughter with one broken hand. Learning to be quiet, learning to be still, learning someone would come for her, learning her death would be quick.
Her sweet Cassie, all alone—
“He’s not dead,” Jim says abruptly.
Their daughter shakes her head. “Peter says if he’s gone a long time then he’s dead. Dead dead.”
She supposes Peter Parker had to prepare Cassie for every outcome. And he had to prepare her for the most likely one—that Peter would die in that bunker, bloodily and painfully, and then Cassie would never see him again.
“Cassie, honey, I promise he’s not dead.”
“Peter doesn’t lie. He promised! He promised! He said—” Cassie’s voice cracks, wanes, and she hides her face in her knees like she’s trying to shut herself up again. “He’s dead—dead…”
Her daughter used to cry about losing soccer games—about not getting desert—about homework and bedtimes and not being able to pet service dogs as they passed on the sidewalk.
And now… Her new daughter cries about dead teenage boys and a drug addict named Ava and the fingers a bearded man broke with a hammer.
“He’s not dead,” Jim says again, with an earnestness that at last makes Cassie look up.
“He is—”
“He’s not,” he assures her. “He’s coming back soon, I promise.”
Cassie sniffs, a line of mucus trailing from her nose to her mouth, and she sniffs again. Her face is red-cheeked and messy from the crying. “Pinky swear?”
Jim nods, but it’s not enough. Cassie uncurls her arm from Jim’s then and with her good hand, reaches out to touch his. Her other one stays curled at her side as it always does, braced in stiff plaster. The scar on her lip pulls as she looks up at her stepfather with a little upset and a little hope.
Jim makes a short bout of eye contact with Maggie; his hard face falls.
“Pinky swear,” her husband says, and Jim locks his finger in Cassie’s.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 5:00 PM
Tony’s head hurts.
His vision’s a little blurry; he keeps blinking to fix it, and the walls of the courtroom blur around him, too—morphing into the steel trap of the lab. The tables covered with scribbled-in notebooks. The walls plastered in post-it notes. The floors muddled with coffee stains. The television humming static.
It’s all there every time he shuts his eyes. Every blink is a flash of that five-month nightmare.
Tony swears he can hear the phone ringing as the door to the judge’s chamber opens, and Judge Pearce walks out—her hair is tied back now in a tight ponytail, and she’s grasping a thick file of papers in one hand. A woman follows her—Sarah, who is speaking to her with her head ducked, gesturing with one hand at the file the judge holds. The judge nods, and nods again, and pats her once on the back before Sarah returns to the crowd.
As she returns to her desk, others file in too, in pairs and in groups, until finally the courtroom is filled again. People take to their seats quickly, but there’s a quiet hum in the courtroom—whispering.
They’re all sitting at the prosecution’s table — Matt Murdock and Foggy on one end, Bucky and Sam Wilson on the other, Tony and Peter on the middle.
And on the other side… He’s there.
Charlie.
The bearded man—whose voice still rings loud in Tony’s mind, his gravelly shouts, his drug-addled screams. The thunk of the hammer, the hiss of the blowtorch, the shrrrk of the chair as it flattens.
He can still hear that blond man howling at Peter, can still see the short man’s guilty expression, can still see Charlie’s eyes flick to the kid—and the immediate scowl that followed.
At the front of the room, the judge sits down at last. “All right,” Judge Pearce says. “Do we have everyone?”
There’s some talking between her and the young deputy.
“Perfect. Let’s finish this up, folks, and then we can all go home. I know it’s been a long day.”
There’s some obvious discontent in the courtroom pews: people whispering to others, uncomfortable shifting in seats. Arraignments never go on this long—never more than half an hour, and it’s already been two full hours with two well-earned breaks.
The state prosecutor goes up to the podium for a few minutes and speaks to the judge when she is called. Some others talk, too, and Murdock whispers a couple things to him, but none of it registers. He thinks instead about Pepper—about the baby slowly growing in Pepper’s stomach—their baby girl. Names. Maria, maybe, after his mother. Virginia, after Pepper and her mother, maybe.
He’ll build something for this little girl. A playset with swings. A kid-sized car with kid-sized airbags. Lego sets, computer games, whatever she wants.
Thinking about this slows his thumping heart, and when Tony lifts his head again, the bearded man is standing up.
Orange jumpsuit. Brown beard. Wide, bloodshot eyes. One arm cut off at the wrist, wound in bandages.
Beside Tony, Peter is still and quiet—his eyes watching the man as he moves. He’s worse now—much worse. His face has taken on this sallow look, his body stiff with tension, his hand clasping his broken knee where Cho’d attempted to brace it. He’s hunched himself over a bit, too, as though to protect himself, his other arm curled around his side. The kid’s barely moving with each breath, and his red-rimmed eyes stare up at the man as he sits. Foggy Nelson has shifted around the table a bit so that his body blocks Peter’s view of the defense’s table, but it doesn’t change much.
The guards shove Charlie forward, and he takes a few heavy steps up the stairs, careful of his movements—as though aware of himself, as though he’s sober.
He must be sober—right?
A couple more steps and he’s standing at the podium; sitting in his chair, Charlie pokes at his eyes with his stumped arm, rubbing his eyes red. Like Tony, his legs shake, and his hand twitches where it is cuffed at his side.
“Your name?” calls out the judge.
“Charlie,” the bearded man spits.
“Full name, please,” she says, like she did with Peter.
“Charles Anthony Keene.”
His voice is lower than Tony remembers. Quieter. Sober, maybe. Charlie’s always been a fast-moving creature—lumbering one way or another, throwing knives and missing, tripping over his own feet, words slurring one to the other, sweat pouring down his forehead, face dotted with sprayed specks of blood.
Was it the drugs that made him this way? Or was he like this from the start? Was it his childhood? His cop sister? His wife?
The man answers a few more questions, and Peter is quiet as usual. His hood is down now, as the judge instructed, and his arms are folded around himself. In an hour, maybe, they’ll be home again. In an hour, maybe, he can get Peter up and talking again.
Judge Pearce asks Charlie about the indictment and starts to list the charges. There’s a lot of them. Homicide after homicide, accessory to this and that, enough that Tony starts to tune them out. He’s focused more on the man’s mannerisms—waiting for him to lunge like Jon Walker did, waiting for him to snap. But so far, the man has been relatively calm. He keeps his eyes trained firmly on the table in front of him as he answers the judge’s questions.
And he hasn’t looked at Peter for more than a second. Nothing like Haroun, who couldn’t take his eyes off Peter. Or Jon, who stared at him with such unbridled rage that he had to be dragged away. Or Renee, who looked at him like something sour, like Peter was something she’d found clinging to the shower drain or stuck to the underside of her shoe. Even Riri took a few moments to look at the kid before blinking away tears.
But Charlie? His eyes don’t leave the damn podium, not once.
“... Mr. Keene, how do you plead to this charge?”
Charlie grumbles at the desk and moves his wrist, chain jangling; one of the guards squeezes his shoulder as a warning. “That’s not my name,” he says.
The judge frowns at him. “Sir, just answer the question.”
The bearded man makes a huff of a noise through gritted teeth, sitting back in his chair. “Guilty,” he spits at the woman, and he twists his neck to one side; his brown hair shakes. For a moment, Charlie’s eyes flash angrily up at Peter—a look chock-full of rage.
Tony hears Peter’s breathing stop cold in his chest. Then, he tries to think of something good—opens his eyes, sees Peter look over at him—between the two of them, a moment lilts—and Peter grabs onto Tony’s sleeve—an anchor. He focuses on that feeling—Peter’s hand grasping superhero-tight onto his wrist, how it hurts just a little. Peter’s hand: a tether, keeping him steady.
When Tony looks up again, the judge is asking Charlie more questions, and the man grows more agitated with every word.
“...number fifty-three, drug trafficking, how do you plead?”
But this time, Charlie doesn’t respond. He’s still staring down Peter. He makes a move to get up, and the security guard shoves him back down.
“Mr. Keene, please remain in your seat—”
“That’s not my name,” Charlie says again, and this time Tony recognizes it as though it’s written on the man’s forehead. The licking of his teeth, the flick of his eyes, the ever-so-often smiling to himself. The sweat speckling his forehead, the flush in his cheeks, the way he twists his neck as though to crack it.
He’s high.
“He’s not…” Tony hears himself say. His gaze is still on the bearded man—the one-and-only threat in the courtroom. “He’s…”
“What’d you say?” says Sam from beside him; the man is frowning at him, brow tight with worry. “Tony?”
At the podium, Charlie twists his neck again, and his cuffs all jangle as he jerks—the guards pin him back down to his chair.
“He’s high,” Tony says again. He rarely ever saw Charlie sober, he thinks—the man was never onscreen for more than a couple seconds before he was taking something—whether it was a pill or a syringe or a fine line of powder on the table.
“That’s not possible,” Sam assures him, with a pat to his shoulder.
He shakes his head, and another memory seeps into him—men dragging a pale-faced Peter to his chair; the kid yanking confusedly at his arms, Charlie Keene shouting, “Eyes on the screen, Stark! EYES ON THE MOTHERFUCKING SCREEN!” Tony can feel it now—the panic washing over him like a bucket of ice water, and he grips the edge of the table with his sweating hands and tries not to say anything else.
“Don’t worry, Tony,” Sam says on his other side—pressing his hand down at his shoulder in some false reassurance. “He’s in cuffs. He can’t touch him.”
“But he’s…” Tony tries to continue, but he can’t even bring himself to finish that sentence. “No—no. We’ve gotta get the kid out of here. We have to…”
He can hear the phone about to ring, the buzz of TV static, and a wave of panic hits him so hard that he feels lightheaded. Tony braces his hand against the table in another attempt to stand up, and Sam clasps his hand on his shoulder: another warning, “Tony.”
On the other side of the podium, Judge Pearce is still talking to Charlie; the bearded man has one hand clenched in a fist in his lap, and he licks his teeth as the woman speaks. “Oh, come on—” the man spits out, and for a third time he stands. “I only did to Parker what he fucking deserved—”
“Sit down and be quiet, Mr. Keene, or I’ll—”
“That’s not my name!” Charlie snarls, and his voice is so loud that the room seems frozen as he does, and he whips his head towards the judge, who is rendered speechless by the sudden motion. “I said that’s not my name, you stupid bitch!”
Every sense of stillness from the previous second has been washed away clean.
This is the Charlie he knows.
This is the one who hurt Peter — who took a hammer to a teenager’s knee, who locked him inside of his own lab, who murdered members of his own crew, who killed his own sister with a hammer and then laughed.
This is Charlie.
The judge stares open-mouthed at him, rendered mute as the bearded man looks around—and again, settles his wild eyes on Peter. “He knows my name,” Charlie spits, with a stab of his bandaged arm. His forehead shines with sweat, and he blinks his eyes open wide, tilting his head, and says, “Don’t you, Parker?”
The guards are trying to force him to sit again, pulling at Charlie’s arms, and pushing down on his shoulders, but the man’s still talking, cackling, pointing with his stumped arm at the kid. “He knows! He knows! Look at me, Parker, TELL ‘EM MY NAME! WHAT’S MY FUCKING—”
“—Keene, one more word, and I will have you removed from my court—”
“I said LOOK AT ME, PARKER! FUCKING LOOK AT ME!”
Tony feels very cold—beside him, someone is speaking to him, yet he can scarcely hear it. Sweat comes down his armpits in cool trails, and somewhere, somewhere he can hear television static.
And without lifting his head, just his eyes, Peter’s stare moves to Charlie—and locks on the bearded man. His mouth moves: a whisper of sound that Tony doesn’t catch.
He’s obeying him.
“Peter,” Tony tries, but when he tries to look at the kid, all he sees is—
—his face swollen and purpled, his knee a mess of blood. Again, Tony is helpless. “Peter!” he screeches, and he fists the phone in one hand, pressing it against the side of his head. Helpless. “Peter, it’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be—”
The bearded man is laughing again, and the sound sticks in Tony’s mind as the judge announces, “Security, take him, please.”
As the guards yank at Charlie, and he smacks at the guards with his missing hand: “HEY—HEY! LOOK AT ME, PARKER! SEE WHAT YOU DID TO ME, YOU FUCKING FREAK!” Peter shifts in his chair—all of a sudden, he’s standing up, too. He mumbles again; he’s standing up on his injured knee, whispering to himself, and this time Tony recognizes the word.
He’s saying one word. A name.
Charlie.
He’s answering Charlie’s question.
“Peter,” says Sam, and his hand hovers near the kid—afraid to touch him. “Sit down, kid. Peter. Hey.”
Murdock seems to notice what’s happening, and he starts to talk when Peter says that man’s name again, taking a step forward. Where is he—
He’s not listening to Matt Murdock or Sam or Tony, even—no, the kid’s looking directly at Charlie fucking Keene. “Charlie,” Peter repeats, a croak, and then he moves again, tripping past Sam, staggering out onto the carpet towards the bearded man.
The judge is standing now, too, speaking firmly to Charlie with her hand outstretched; she’s trying to hold his attention, saying, “...at me, sir…”
Everyone’s talking all at once: the guards yelling at Charlie and pulling at him, Bucky and Sam telling Peter not to move, the security guards arguing, Murdock shouting for someone to help, and Charlie’s screaming, “PARKER—ANSWER ME!”
Tony’s legs feel locked into place, like he’s kneeled in front of a grainy television screen, like he’s got his ear pressed to a telephone. He can’t move. He can only watch, helpless, as Peter stumbles out onto the carpet—Sam Wilson tries to get an arm around him and misses—because after everything, the kid is still enhanced. Those muscle relaxants make him weaker, not slower. Peter sideslips Sam with unusual speed and limps across the courtroom floor to the man.
The two security guards are too busy holding Charlie back to stop Peter—and the kid’s fast. Sam follows the kid— “Peter! Peter, stop—” and misses a second time. The kid flinches away from Sam and trips again, landing hard on his bad knee in the carpet, launching himself forward one more time to grab a fistful of Charlie’s orange jumpsuit. “I’m sorry,” Peter gasps out, “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—”
Sorry?
One of Charlie’s guards tries to push Peter backwards but the kid just crouches lower to the ground and grasps hard at Charlie’s clothed leg, choking on every word. “Please—please, I didn’t wanna run, they made me run, I didn’t—”
“Peter,” Sam Wilson tries, and he gets both arms locked around Peter for just a second before the kid claws at his face suddenly, forcing Sam to cry out and let go. For a second time, Peter throws himself at Charlie’s feet. “THEY MADE ME—” he screeches and the kid’s voice flips from loud shrieking to a strangled whisper as he cries, “They made me, I didn’t want to go, please—please—we didn’t know…”
Tony feels the whole room’s eyes on him; at the front of the room, the judge is silent now. Sam is backing away slowly from the kid, his hand covering his face where the kid struck him. He looks up at the judge, who swallows and says, “Security—please bring… Bring him back to the prosecution’s table, please.”
Sam doesn’t move, though; it’s Barnes who walks forward, black-suited with his thick vest and strides over to the pair.
“...wanna go, please, please—I’ll come back, I wanna—come back…”
Charlie’s staring down at Peter with an amused half-smirk, mouth open, his smile slowly growing; Peter’s got a fistful of the man’s pant leg, still sobbing into the floor, and Barnes gets ahold of him then. With a whine of vibranium metal, Barnes pins him back with his metal arm, trying to get a good grip on him. “Peter,” the Winter Soldier manages, gruff, trying to get his arm around him, “Peter, calm down—“
The supersoldier gets half an arm around him and pulls him backwards—Peter screeches like someone’s taken a knife to him, clawing at the black-clothed man in vain—but unlike Sam, Bucky doesn’t flinch. “I DIDN'T WANT TO! I DIDN'T WANT TO! I DIDN’T—"
And finally Barnes finally manages to get ahold of the kid, wrapping his arm around Peter’s chest and hauling him backwards—and Peter’s hand clasped in Charlie’s pant leg there’s a loud rrrip as the knee of his leg tears free of the man’s jumpsuit.
Bucky’s got Peter now though, pulling him backwards across the courtroom a couple feet at a time, and at the defense’s table, held back by two security guards, Charlie Keene is laughing.
The pant leg of his orange jumpsuit is torn and open wide, and Charlie Keene is laughing.
And laughing.
And laughing.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 5:26 PM
The hearing is not over yet.
There’s one more, and the judge calls him up next. Charlie’s gone now, back to whatever cell he came from, and now Quentin Beck is standing up at the podium. Brown-haired with dark brown eyes, and an oddly pleasant smile. He smiles at the judge as he sits down, and the cuffs between his wrists jangle.
Peter is no longer sitting quietly; Barnes still has him in a vice grip, vibranium arm braced over Peter’s chest, pinning his arms down with ease as Peter makes this strange huffing sound—a taut series of irregular breaths with his eyes screwed shut like he’s waiting for something to happen. He’s holding his breath, and holding it again, and every now and then he takes a sharp breath.
“Breathe, Peter,” Bucky is saying, and even through the man’s grim face Tony can see the concern written over him. “Just breathe—you’re fine. It’s almost over.”
They can’t get him to sit down again. They’ve stopped trying.
Peter’s holding that piece of cloth in his hand still—the torn remnant of Charlie’s jumpsuit. Tony tried to get it out of his hand a couple minutes ago, but the kid’s got a tight hold on it, his fingers clawed into the orange cloth like it’s a fucking souvenir.
The judge makes it quick, thank God. She asks for Beck’s name, and he is almost pleasant with her, answering simply and calmly. “And your age, Mr. Beck.”
“Thirty-nine.”
A couple more questions, and then Judge Pearce lists the charges. Fewer than the others, but Tony refuses to listen. He shoves his hands over his ears—and the world goes soft around him—the judge’s voice muffled through his fingers.
“Not guilty,” the man says.
Tony doesn’t think about it. He won’t.
When the man is done, he smiles a mouthful of white teeth at the judge, then at the rows of people, and then heads back down the steps without a fight.
He is the last defendant, which means their turn is up.
The judge clears her throat and rambles for a while about the prosecution, summarizing what happens next, but Tony already knows what’s going to happen.
It’s Peter’s turn.