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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 6:29 PM
At last it’s over.
The podiums disperse slowly. Pepper shifts onto her feet, standing to find her fiancé in the milling crowd. Steve and Sam Wilson are already walking through the double doors as she leaves the pew, Steve looking like he’s been punched in the gut. Natasha stands with her arms folded by the courtroom’s exit. She nods at the two men as they pass.
Across the room, Agent Jimmy Woo is talking with Happy; they both look grim. She walks over to the plaintiff’s table where Murdock still sits with his partner and Tony. Tony is keeled over in his chair with his head in his hands. Both men are speaking to him; Nelson hovers a hand above Tony’s back and pats a couple times while Murdock says something to him that Pepper can’t hear. Neither do much for Tony, who just shakes his head and remains seated.
Pepper moves through the crowd, passing emptying pew after emptying pew until she reaches the plaintiff’s table where all three are still. Foggy looks up at her, grimaces uncomfortably, and stands, grabbing his briefcase and leaving. She takes the empty spot and touches Tony’s clothed shoulder. “Tony,” she says, and her fiancé looks up. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
With some effort, they manage to get him moving; Tony keeps shutting his eyes and muttering to himself; Pepper grasps his upper arm and squeezes, just a little—reminding him she’s there—and then drops her hand back to her side.
They make it all the way out into the hallway, where Happy gets a text from Barnes. He tilts the screen in her direction: [peter safe. Meet @car.]
“It might be rough out there,” Happy says. “Paparazzi are all over this case—and Tony’s not exactly…”
They both look to Tony, who’s blinking dazedly now at the doorway, backing away from it even as Rhodey guides him towards it. “They took him,” he says, sounding increasingly distressed. “They… They took him…”
“Barnes has him,” Pepper reminds him, but he doesn’t respond so she touches her hand lightly to his back. “He took him to the parking garage—he’s okay.”
He nods, and his mouth downturns. Tony is still staring at the doorway like it’s something sinister—like crossing it would be the end of the world. “He’s…” he starts, and then he takes an unsteady step back. Pepper nudges him forward, and again he hesitates, stiffening only inches from the door.
“He’s safe,” Tony says, and he squeezes his eyes shut again. “Right?”
“Yes,” she says. “I swear he is.”
“Gone,” says Happy grimly. “I checked—they took them back in armored cars.”
Tony nods his bearded chin a second time, taks a shaky breath, and follows Happy through the courtroom doors.
They walk to the parking garage in a group, swarmed by photographers and reporters for a few minutes. White flashes from cameras. Microphones shoved into their faces. Rhodey hurries ahead with Tony; Happy removes his suit jacket and does his best to shield them from the cameras.
Despite the paparazzi, though, they make it to the parking garage unscathed.
Barnes is there alone, standing outside of Happy’s black Mercedes with his arms folded across his suited chest. His eyes lock on them as they approach, and he nods once to the passenger side of Happy’s car—the doors are shut and the windows are up. A few cars down, Steve and Sam are talking quietly with Sarah.
Peter must be inside; Tony can see someone through the tinted windows: a long-haired shadow. He staggers to the car, light-headed with panic; he grasps the door handle, swallows, and opens it.
Peter is in the farthest corner of the backseat; he’s trembling. His eyes are red and wide and wholly focused on Tony, and he’s got something gripped tightly in his hand. When Tony looks closer, he sees: it’s a torn piece of orange fabric, a piece of Charlie’s prison jumpsuit—a souvenir, he thinks oddly, from his time in court. The kid has crowded himself into the far window in some attempt to make himself look smaller, and for some reason the right knee of his sweatpants is dark—damp. Wet, as though with blood.
He’s hurt.
“Peter,” Tony whispers, “you’re—”
A second mistake. Just as he outstretches his hand towards the kid, Peter recoils violently, pushing himself further into the car door.
Safe, Pepper had said, but now he’s not so sure. No one’s got a gun to Peter’s head or a knife to his throat or a hammer to his knee, but the kid’s bleeding and frightened and Tony can almost hear that damn phone ringing.
Tony takes a couple steps back from the car and, leaving the car door open, approaches black-suited Barnes. “What happened to his leg?” he demands.
(He can’t help but think of Bucky’s prosthetic arm. Vibranium. Painted black, but still pure vibranium. The only metal in the world stronger than Peter. The same metal his cell door was made of, the same metal that lined the chair. The only thing that could hold him down.)
“He was fighting me,” the Winter Soldier states. His arms are still folded, his voice flat, and his face still. “Kept trying to get away.” Then he adds, with a spare glance towards the open car door, “I was as gentle as I could.” His sleeves are tight against his muscular arms, his white shirt pulled taut over his bulletproof vest. With an awkward glance to Tony, Barnes combs his hair back with his fingers, tucking it behind his ear.
It's a nervous motion, not one he’s used to seeing on supersoldiers, and Tony quickly looks away. There’s no evidence of Peter’s fight on Barnes, but there is on Sam, being non-enhanced: his lip is swelling on one side, his dark face littered in marks. His eye is bad, too—a scratch underneath and the lid is already swelling, half his brown eye visible. He nods slightly at Tony, an acknowledgement.
“Jesus,” Happy says, and Tony blinks, trying to remember how it happened. All he remembers is Peter on the courtroom floor, thrashing in his effort to reach Charlie Keene. Why would he go towards Charlie? he keeps thinking. Why the hell would Peter want to be anywhere near that man?
But Tony remembers how this used to go. Peter stopped trying to escape a long time ago, after his first 30 days trapped in that bunker; after that, he just tried to make the pain lessen. And whether that meant obeying Charlie or apologizing to Renee or getting down on broken knee to plead with his attacker—Peter would do it.
And his mind was still telling him to.
“He didn’t mean to,” Sam says gently, and his uneven lip pulls as he talks. “He was just scared.”
Tony looks towards the car again where Peter still sits. He walks to it and, just as he pushes open the car door again, Peter moves again, throwing himself as far as possible into the car window, and he gasps so loudly that all the talking around Tony stops. He’s shaking. Like a mouse in a trap, like a dog in a cage—like he’s waiting for someone to snap.
Tony takes a step back. Then another, and he lets go of the car door. “Happy,” he says, “can you get him home?”
Happy looks back at him; his beard is mostly gray now, and it makes him look lighter. Softer. “Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”
As the car pulls away, Tony can see a glimpse of Peter in the backseat, his hood fallen away, curled up against the tinted window.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 7:09 PM
After the hearing is over, Jimmy Woo lingers at the courthouse.
He has one mission: track down Secretary Ross with the information he has—and figure out how he’s involved with the Stark Seven. He waits in the hallway as the Secretary of Defense greets a couple of the defendants, and then again as he talks to the judge. Nearly forty minutes passes as the man makes his rounds, until at last he smooths his hair, fixes his suit jacket, and exits the courthouse doors.
Jimmy follows him.
He trails him all the way to the parking garage, and once he’s sure they’re alone, he quickens his pace. “Ross,” he declares, and his voice echoes across the parking structure. “I know what you did.”
The man halts in his tracks so suddenly that Jimmy does, too. He turns around, and Jimmy swallows a sudden stone in his throat as the man stares him down. His palms are now damp with sweat, and he closes them into fists.
“What did you just say to me?” Ross says.
Jimmy resists the urge to step back. “You heard me,” he says. His hands hovers over the gun at his belt as Ross takes a step towards him, and Jimmy lifts his chin. “I know you’re involved. So—tell me what you did, or I’m going to the FBI with what I know.”
“And what,” the man says, his heel scraping against asphalt as he moves towards Jimmy, “exactly do you think you know?”
“I know you knew him—Charlie Keene—before this all went down.” He remembers Ross’ young secretary—Kate Bishop, in her NYU sweatshirt and high-waisted jeans. In college, a freshman maybe, and horrified by what she’d discovered about her boss. I think, she’d said, my boss has been up to some really shady shit. She didn’t have much more to go off of then a few phone calls and some familiar names, but that was enough for Woo—enough for Julia to be able to track down her brother.
“The others, too,” he adds. “I know you talked with them—before they were caught.” Charlie, Kate had said, looking unnerved, her expression fraught with confusion and concern. Parker. Lang. Nick. All super common…
Before August 24th, they’d had no idea what tied those names together. Now they know. Charlie Keene, the ringleader. Nicholas Scratch, one of Charlie’s goons. Scott Lang. Peter Parker. Now the puzzle pieces made more sense.
The man hums and smirks at him. “And how exactly would you know that?”
“Not all of your people are as loyal as you think,” Jimmy spits, hoping to twist the knife in a little deeper, and he tries to keep the tremble out of his voice. “Project Manticore, right?”
Why is Ross not afraid? Why the hell isn’t he afraid?
“Thanks for the heads up,” Ross says coolly. “But I have no idea what you’re talking about. You should get back to the wife, Jimmy—get some rest. You’re acting paranoid.”
“No,” he snaps. “I don’t know what you did—or why—but I don’t have to. If you won’t tell me, then I’ll tell the FBI. About Project Manticore—about Charlie Keene, everything.”
The man smiles at him and, with an eerily pleasant tone, says, “Careful, Jimmy.”
Jimmy’s hand lingers over his gun; sweat comes down his back as the man’s warning echoes in his mind: careful. Why isn’t he scared? Why wouldn’t he be?
“I heard your wife just had another baby,” Ross says, completely ignoring Woo’s threats. “What’s his name? Billy? Bobby? Bradley?”
Woo’s mouth goes dry. His son’s name echoes in his mind like a fading bell.
“Yeah, real cute kid. He enjoying the new day care?”
How does he know that? How the hell does he know that?
Ross takes another step towards Woo and pats his shoulder—Woo flinches. “Three of them now—good for you, Jimmy. And your oldest—she’s in… What, third grade now?”
“Yeah,” he says, feeling dazed.
The man hums a little, confirming what he’s saying. He sniffs, and his white mustache moves slightly. He squeezes Jimmy’s shoulder again, a painfully-tight grip, and Jimmy doesn’t dare touch his gun. “This is about the sister, isn’t it? Julia… whatever her name was.”
Julia de Paz. Charlie Keene’s sister, Jimmy Woo’s former partner, mother of two and police officer. She was murdered so brutally that her funeral was closed-casket, her face so damaged that her children didn’t get to see their mother’s face again.
Jimmy saw the autopsy. He didn’t even recognize her.
“Listen to me carefully, Jim,” the man says, and he leans in a bit closer, his voice deathly low. His grip only gets tighter—Jimmy’s shoulder begins to hurt and still he doesn’t dare move. “I don’t care if she was your friend, or your partner, or if you were fucking her on the side. She’s dead. And your life right now is pretty good. If you want to keep it that way, then I suggest you let her stay dead.” Another squeeze. “We understand each other?”
Jimmy nods mutely.
“Good.”
Secretary Ross releases his shoulder and pats once more. “It was good to see you again, Jimmy,” he says. His mouth upturns, his mustache shifting over his mouth—a satisfied smile. “Take care.”
With that, the man turns and walks right into the elevator.
Jimmy stands still, his hand still hovering over his gun.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 7:35 PM
Traffic is bad. Bumper to bumper traffic all the way to Avengers Tower. Some paparazzi follow, but they lose most of them in the packed streets. When they arrive, they go into the lower levels—the Tower’s main parking structure—and once they arrive the others are already there.
There’s a couple people crowded around Happy’s car. Sarah is touching her brother Sam’s face, prodding gingerly at the edges of his swollen eye; Steve and Bucky talking quietly a few feet away. Dr. Cho rode with them, and she’s talking with Pepper about Tony’s heart. He’s not listening; he’s mostly trying not to think about the blood dampening Peter’s knee. God, that day—it was all the way back in April, on Peter’s second day inside but Tony remembers like it was only minutes ago. The crunching sound the hammer made upon impact. The scream that came from Peter’s mouth. And since then, his knee has been broken and half-healed and rebroken again. Somehow it’s still happening—how familiar that pain must be.
This is all his fault. Tony’s the one who waited weeks to tell Peter about the hearing. He’s the one who dragged him back into that courtroom. God, he’s the one who got Peter taken in the first place.
Pepper tugs at his arm then, and Natasha turns to greet them. “Stark,” the red-haired woman says. “Hey—we, uh… We couldn’t get him out of the car.”
Beside her, Sarah Wilson grimaces and then nods in agreement. “He’s not responding to much at all.”
Cho suggests a sedative; Sarah doesn’t object.
“I told you,” Tony says, “we’re not doing that anymore.”
Natasha takes a step towards him. “I had to knock him out before,” she says. “When we… found him in the…” When Tony doesn’t respond, she continues, “He didn’t recognize us… I don’t think he knew what was going on. I mean, he was so afraid that he just crawled to the wall and…”
Tony’s never seen the footage, but Pepper has—her face stiffens, and her hand curls against Tony’s back.
“He didn’t run,” Rhodey says. “He just…
A terse silence. They’ve all seen Peter the way he is now, for better or for worse. They know how frightened he is, how confused he is, how he’ll do anything to spare himself or Cassie pain.
He remembers again how Peter staggered towards Charlie and tripped forward, launching himself towards the bearded man, grasping a fistful of his prison jumpsuit and gasping, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry…” He remembers Peter shouting to Charlie even as security tried to pull him away, begging to go back to the bunker, pleading.
It took a second for the things Peter said to sink into Tony’s head.
He’d asked to go back.
Even though the bunker’s now been stripped of all its weaponry and been taped up like a crime scene, and all of its former inhabitants are dead, in jail, or living at the Tower, Peter still wanted to go back. In a haze of fear, Peter had begged to go back.
Why the hell would he do that?
“Let me try,” Tony blurts out.
Rogers takes one step to the side, blocking Tony’s view of the open car door; he looks smart in his suit, and tougher than he did in the courtroom, now standing upright with his arms folded. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” he says. “Kid’s not in a good place right now.”
Tony scoffs, and he feels it bubble up inside him, a surge of helplessness, of suppressed rage, and all he can see is Steve Rogers—the man who helped save Peter five months too late, the only person keeping him from seeing his kid. “No one asked you, Rogers. Move.”
Beside him, Pepper’s head turns to look at him.
Steve stays where he is, infuriatingly planted in front of Happy’s car. “I spent time in there with him—I know what he was like after, and he’s in no place to—”
“I said no one asked you, Rogers,” Tony says stiffly, and at the same time Pepper huffs, “Tony,” under her breath. But he’s sick of people trying to stop him from helping Peter—worst of all Steve Rogers. He’s sick of people trying to help him and failing. Where was Rogers for those five months when Peter went missing? Where was Barnes or Sam or Nat or Thor? Why didn’t they notice he was gone? Why didn’t they do something?
Here they were, a roomful of superheroes—and none of them saved Peter.
Rogers’ face looks different now. There are still faint lines on his face from whatever happened to him in the bunker, that pull diagonal across his face like he was struck with something. “Out of all of us,” he says, “I was the only one who spent time with him while he was trapped in there. I saw him when he got back from that room, when he—”
“And how long was that?” he snaps. “Six, seven hours?”
Steve’s jaw tightens, muscle shifting under skin; his blue eyes glint. “Ten.”
“Right,” he says. “Not even a day. So you think that compares to four and a half months? What would you know about what Peter went through?”
His brow flattens. “I never said—“`
“You think I don’t know?” Tony spits, taking a step towards the man, and Rogers automatically steps backwards, still fucking blocking him from Peter. “I was there, Rogers, I saw exactly what happened to him. You spend ten hours in there and you think you understand when he’s been through?”
Steve is silent for a moment, and Tony can see it all, flitting through his mind like passing train cars: the blowtorch’s blue-hot flame, the crowbar pressed against the skin of Peter’s face. A glinting knife poised over Peter’s fingertip, a wet cloth pressed over Peter’s face. A hammer raised and falling— “I’m just saying—”
“Shut up, Rogers! Just shut up!” Tony tries to get past Steve again, but the supersoldier matches him, mirroring his sidestep, a wall of flesh between him and Happy’s car. Tony shoves his palms into Rogers’ chest and the man pushes back twice as hard—a military push.
“Put your hands on me again, Stark, and I’ll—”
“Alright,” says Sam, trying to move between them. “I think we’ve all had a long day—”
“Stay out of this, Wilson,” Tony snaps, pushing him backwards with his open hand.
“He’s just trying to help—”
“Wilson, stay out of this! ” he shouts, whirling back onto Rogers, who bristles suddenly. “You don’t know a thing about what Peter went through, Rogers—you weren’t there—none of you were there!”
“I was there,” Rogers snaps, and something in his voice has shifted, turned dark, turned vicious. “I was locked in there with him, Tony, they shot me—they, they beat me, they—”
“And you healed up just fine, didn’t you?” Tony scoffs.
Steve’s face hardens.
“You weren’t there,” Tony continues. “You couldn’t possibly understand—”
“Oh, and you do?” Steve says coldly, taking a menacing step forward; all of a sudden, Bucky Barnes’ gloved hand is on Steve’s sleeved arm. Steve shakes it off and stabs his finger into Tony’s chest. “You were never in that cell, Stark. Nobody laid a hand on you, you have no fucking clue, they never touched you—”
Tony shoves him back hard enough that his hands thump against Rogers’ chest, and Rogers shoves him harder, roughly enough that Tony staggers backwards a few steps, causing Barnes to move forward a second time, unable to get between them. “Put your hands on me again, Iron Man,” he says. “Try it and let’s see who comes out on the other side.”
“Steve,” says Barnes carefully, and Steve shakes off the other man’s vibranium hand from his shoulder.
“You weren’t in that cell,” repeats Steve, and his voice could cut glass. “What happened in there—you couldn’t possibly understand what he’s thinking—”
“And what would you know about it?” Tony spits. “Huh? Five months, Rogers, and you just come swooping in to save the day! You think that makes up for all the rest? It doesn’t. You weren’t there for him. You—weren’t— there!”
“Well, no one was there, Tony, that’s the problem, isn’t it? And whose fault is that?”
It's like a physical blow to Tony's chest, and he grips his hands at his sides, his hands coiling into fists.
Barnes tries to weave between them for the umpteenth time but Steve pushes him away, taking stalking steps towards Tony. “You dragged a kid into our fight, and look what happened to him. Everything that’s happened since Germany is on you. All of it. This is on you, what happened to him—not us. He was your responsibility, you did this to him, you let him get—”
Tony’s fist makes impact before Steve can finish his sentence.
Steve’s head barely moves from the punch; he immediately wipes the blood from his mouth and shoves him backwards so hard that Tony trips backwards, catches himself, and throws his throbbing fist forward again, his bare knuckles cracking against Steve’s face. Steve’s fist is harder though, like a clay brick, and when he hits Tony back there’s an utter distinct crack.
His whole face alights with pain.
The pain spreads white through his face and rings all the way out to his ears, and it stuns him so badly that he doesn’t realize he’s on the ground until he feels his head against the asphalt. He’s on his hands and knees in the parking garage, and when he looks up through the bright haze of stinging pain, he sees the supersoldier walking briskly off. “Pack your shit,” Tony snarls, his voice already going nasal as his nose swells, and his mouth tastes awful and metallic, “and get out of my Tower—out! Come near me or Peter again and I’ll drag you out of here myself!”
Rogers is already walking off angrily, followed quickly by Barnes; he’s got his human hand on the other arm and Steve jerks away from the hand, storming off. Barnes glances back at Tony, expressionless, and follows Steve into the rows of cars.
Tony takes another few seconds, once the worst of that spectacular pain has died to an achey throb in the front of his face. And when he looks up at the spot where Happy’s car is, he finds it empty. Dr. Cho and Sarah are gone—Pepper, too.
They must’ve gone. They must’ve taken Peter while he was…
The stupidity of the whole situation dawns on him. His one responsibility was to help Peter get back to safety, and he couldn’t even do that.
Someone touches his back, and then grips firmly at his elbow, helping him up. Only one person stayed behind for him: Rhodey, and the tall man gives a slight grimace as Tony stands up, but doesn’t say anything.
Steve was right. It is his fault. What happened to Peter—every scar, every cracked bone, every fractured rib, every cut and every bruise—was his fault.
One hundred and forty days Peter spent in captivity and every one of them was Tony’s fault.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 8:20 PM
Jimmy Woo gets home late that night, far later than he usually does.
He stands in their doorway for a couple extra seconds after he takes off his shoes. Ross’ words are still reverberating in his skull. She’s dead, he’d said, with his iron-tight grip on Jimmy’s shoulder. Let her stay dead.
His wife is pissed he’s back so late, so Jimmy apologizes a couple times and helps put the kids to bed. The baby’s long asleep, but Jimmy still goes into his room and watches him; for some reason, he wants to make sure his son’s still breathing.
Later that night, as his wife’s in the shower, he opens up his work computer. He sifts through files until he finds the one he’s looking for, labeled 08232018_DEPAZ_BWC.wmv. He clicks it open and zooms forward until he hits around 9 PM. He’s seen the video dozens of times.
He hits play.
As the video starts, Julia’s body cam is pointed at one of the bunker rooms—in it probably a dozen people dressed in uniforms are sleeping scattered across various bunk beds. The camera shifts and shifts and shifts; Julia’s looking for something—keys to that cell door, maybe. By the wall, there’s a black girl with a bruised face, who has one wrist cuffed to a radiator. She gives the woman a pained smile. “You’re gonna save him?” she asks, her voice dropped to a whisper. Her words are muddled with swelling
“I sure will try,” she says, and the girl nods. “What happened to you—did they take you too?”
The girl shakes her head; it’s obvious, too. She’s dressed just like them. They argue for a couple more seconds before the girl insists, “Just go—there’s no time. Get the keys, they’re over” —she points with her free hand— “by Charlie’s bed.”
She gets the keys without waking anyone, and quickly heads back downstairs and unlocks the operating room. A man in a white coat with a grayish beard embraces her and thanks her repeatedly and asks her to hurry—heading immediately in the wrong direction. “This way,” she says, pointing to the elevators. “Stay quiet, stay close.”
The pair shuffles down the dark hallway, and the video trembles as Julia unlocks the red-starred door and pushes it open. Inside, Steve Rogers is cradling a broken hand to his chest; on the other side, a man lies unconscious and bleeding from several spots in his back. The room is incredibly small: the makeshift bed is a slab of concrete in a frame, and there are scratches all over the walls. A small child crouches by Steve, dressed in a hoodie that’s been ripped open on one side. It’s impossible to tell whether she’s a boy or a girl with her shaved head and sunken face, but Woo knows now that child is Cassie Paxton-Lang, just thirty-some days ago.
Julia whispers, “We gotta go,” and her hand splits the camera's view, motioning towards the boy in the corner—unmistakably Peter Parker. “Now, Steve, we gotta go. They’re pretty high right now—this is our chance.” Woo recognizes him by the scarring mostly, by his burnt ear and gaunt face and all those lines covering the left side of his face, giving him an uneven look. The kid’s eyes shift back and forth from Julia to the unconscious man and to Steve Rogers, distrustful and bloodshot.
“It’s Parker, right?” Julia says, and Peter Parker keeps his mouth closed, blinking dully at the unconscious man sprawled out on the cement floor. He doesn’t respond to his name. “We gotta go, honey. Right now.”
They try forcefully moving the kid, and he makes this strange screeching sound and hugs his knees. Steve tries talking to him, too, but it’s no use until the doctor steps back into view, whispering to the kid; instantaneously, Peter lets the doctor pick him up, and the white-coated man doesn’t struggle beneath the kid’s weight. Not at all. He is gentle—too slow for the urgency of their situation—picking him up gingerly, tenderly, as though the pressure will break him. Peter’s head falls into the crook of the man’s shoulder as though finding some semblance of comfort. Familiarity, maybe, like he’s done this before.
“We gotta go,” comes Julia’s voice from just behind the camera. “Come on!”
As they walk out, Woo can hear Scott Lang’s voice screaming hysterically for his daughter, which quickly alerts the rest of the addicts.
And it’s chaos from there.
There’s lots of blurred movement and clashing voices, until there’s more sudden movement and the person wearing the camera is on the ground; it moves as she groans, like she’s recovering from a hit. “...have to let them go!”
The bearded man in front of the camera grins a wide horrible smile and punches her hard, enough that she groans and the camera twists towards the ground. She doesn’t punch back. The man screeches, “YOU BETRAYED ME, YOU FUCKING BETRAYED ME!”
She coughs—Jimmy can almost feel the pain from the last hit, and she says her brother’s name again and is met with another punch; blood dots the cement floor in the camera’s view. Another punch right next to the camera, straight into the woman’s stomach.
“I TRUSTED YOU! I TRUSTED YOU! I TRUSTED YOU!”
She chokes out another sound and tries to get up but the bearded man has her pinned down with one massive hand and strikes again; her hands grapple at him uselessly. His hand moves along his waist and finds the weapon there—a hammer. He removes it from his belt and swings it high up into the air, and his expression twists manic—his eyes going even wider, and the woman screams, “ Charlie, NO! CHARL—” just as he brings it down—and the camera hears a wet crunch.
The hammer comes up again and then quickly back down, and there’s another crunch, and a spray of red. The woman makes a gurgly, weak sound. A motion in the corner of the camera’s view: one last attempt to save herself.zd
When the hammer comes down a third time, there’s a crack and the video dies. It’s over. All of Julia’s last moments are in this video: her last word was her brother’s name, and he killed her.
Woo stares at the blank screen for a few minutes, and then gets up and heads back upstairs and goes to bed. He sits in the bathroom and sits on the toilet lid for a while, pressing his hands into his hands into his eyes. He tries not to think about Peter Parker’s smashed up leg, about Cassie Paxton-Lang’s crushed fingers, about Julia’s bludgeoned face. He really does.
But in his mind the images start to overlay—his daughter with crushed fingers, his son with a broken knee, his wife with a hammer to the skull.
As he’s going to sleep, it’s all he can think about. Dead body after dead body after dead body. Julia with her face smashed in. The addicts who overdosed tossed in dumpsters. Ava Starr beaten and tossed in a lake. Those soldiers killed in their cells from arsenic poisoning. That doctor, even, shot in the head and left in the forest. Scott Lang—a guy he knew pretty well, burnt up in a flash of blue light. There weren’t even any parts of him left after that blast—he’s seen the video. Just charred flesh and teeth, and fragments of marred bone. There wasn’t even a body to bury.
He cares for Peter, and for Tony, and for the rest of the victims: all collateral damage of this “Project Manticore.” But if he keeps following this case, he and his family will end up just like them.
He’s just not willing to take that chance.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 9:02 PM
Tony sits out in the hallway with his head tipped upwards, resting against the wall behind him. He’s got a wad of napkins pressed up against his nose. Cho comes by and says, fixedly, “You have a Medbay for a reason.”
He grips at his nose tighter, and the pain is a relief, a clean, sharp pain, and he grumbles, blinking away the sudden sting, “How is he?”
“Fine,” she says. “Sleeping, now.”
They’d had to sedate him after all. Pepper updated him about the whole thing. Not much, but just enough to let them check him over and get him into bed. Enough to let him rest for a while.
“We agreed—Sarah and me—to leave him alone tonight if we can. Letting him sleep off the worst of the day… We think that’s what’s best for him right now.”
“And the knee?” he asks.
“Worse than it was,” she explains. She frowns, rubbing her forehead. “Got a decent scan of it while we had him out…” She passes the tablet to him, and on screen is a scan—he’s no doctor, but he can see what it is with some familiarity and nausea pries at his stomach. The scan starts at the middle of his femur and stops just below his knee. There’s faint white lines stretched like a spiderweb across his leg—healed fractures after healed fractures, but the center is a gross mess of shattered pieces and half-healed tendon and ligament. Barely recognizable as a joint. “Scar tissue is still causing problems. We keep letting him reinjure himself like this and the limp’s gonna be permanent.” She shakes her head. “There’s already a chance it’ll be permanent now, even taking into account his healing factor.”
A sigh. She’s tired, too. They’re all tired.
“I know you have other things to worry about right now,” Cho adds, “but while we’ve got him out, I could get him into surgery. We could do at least some basic reconstruction, get a rod in to stabilize the leg while it heals—”
“No,” he snaps. “Not until he wants to.”
Cho grimaces. “You’re his legal guardian, Tony. He’s completely incapacitated, and a minor. One signature and we can get him into surgery right away. This is your decision, not his.”
“It’s his decision,” he says. “Not until he can consent.”
“I understand your concern, but Tony, the longer we wait—”
“Not until he consents, Cho, I’m not fucking joking. They did enough without his permission in there, I’m not putting him under a fucking knife unless he asks. “
“Tony—”
“Do I need to write it down for you?” he retorts. “He gets to choose. He gets to choose. ”
“Fine,” she says. “Will you at least let me look at your—”
“No,” he snaps, and the sudden movement presses at his nose again, causing an irritating fresh burn of tears at his eyes.
“Fine.” Cho grasps her tablet, turns it off, and stands up to go. “Head down, not up,” she says, gesturing to his face. “Otherwise you’ll just swallow the blood.”
Tony ignores her.
And as soon as the door closes behind her, Tony tips his head down, and a rush of warm, salty blood comes down into the napkin.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 9:38 PM
They didn’t have much to pack from the Tower; it was only ever temporary anyway. Some clothes, bedding, toiletries, other random junk. Nothing more than what they needed. Bucky does most of the packing himself—he’s always been more particular than Steve, more insistent on what goes where.
The drive back is silent. Bucky drives, both hands on the wheel, and Steve can’t bring himself to turn on the radio. His hand doesn’t hurt from the punch, and there’s not even a scratch on his face from where Tony hit him. He’s a supersoldier; Tony never stood a chance against him.
Their Brooklyn place looks the same as it did when they left it. Exactly the same. When Bucky unlocks the door, Steve feels strange, almost ill. It doesn’t feel right, him coming back here. Is he supposed to pretend that everything will be just like it was before? Like the couple scars on his face aren’t still healing? Sure, he got treatment for what that man gave him, but he still feels different. Like if he stares at his hands too long, they’ll blister and boil; or his mouth, even, like his lips will peel and flake off in sheets, like his gums will blacken and bleed.
“I’m going for a run,” he says, as Bucky is crouched by the trunk of the car.
The other man stands up straight, still carrying a bagful of their clothes. He makes a short glance back at the open door of their house, and then back at Steve, as he reverses down the sidewalk.
“Steve,” he says, wavering, and Steve shoots a hard glance back at him, and adds, “I’ll be back.”
Normal. He’s normal. He goes for runs all the time—why should this one be any different? He’s wearing sneakers already, sweats, a decent enough shirt.
So he goes.
He takes his usual route—passing up this street and that one until he’s out of breath, lapping around the dog park and that new college over and over until he’s wildly out of breath. He gets all the way to the bay and back and then finds himself at the dog park again. He jogs the college track for a while, until eventually it’s so late that the sidewalks are completely empty and he’s alone.
When he gets back to the house, all the lights in the house are on and Bucky is in the shower. All of their clothes are on the bed in folded piles—Bucky’s doing—and Steve sorts through them, folding and putting them away, until he spots Bucky in the mirror behind him, drying his shower-wet hair with a damp shirt. Steve turns back to the clothes, pushing sweatshirts onto hangers until the bed’s empty. Bucky likes this, the useless stuff, making the bed before they get in it, so he helps, retucking the duvet and tossing the pillow into their rightful spots.
They get ready for bed together too, even though Steve’s not really tired, and sometime when Bucky’s brushing his teeth and comes to him again—the whole day—and he thinks of that brown-haired man again. His jumpsuit. His brushed hair. His new white teeth.
“Did you do that to him?” he asks suddenly, as Bucky’s climbing under the covers.
“Did I what?” Bucky asks, pausing, but they both know.
Steve never asked Bucky what happened between him and Quentin Beck. He supposes he didn’t want to think about it. “I didn’t…” he tries, and the words get all lost in the bed between them. “His hand. His… His teeth…”
“He deserved it,“ Bucky says simply, still paused on the other side of the bed. “He—”
“I know, I just…” Steve pauses; Bucky looks at him so expectantly in the lamplight. “Is that how you see me,” he asks, “after what—what happened?”
Bucky is silent for a moment. His hair is still damp; the lamp at their bedside glows faintly. “What do you mean?”
Steve can see it still—that pitch-like rage, still tempering deep in the recesses of Bucky’s mind. Him standing outside of that police station. Him walking into Beck’s cell. Him shutting the door behind him. The teeth, Steve tries to picture, but his mind fills instead with gaps.
“Nevermind,” he says, and he turns off the main bedroom light, and then he sits on the bed. He doesn’t have anything left to do; no excuse not to climb in. “Just… I’m not Peter.”
“I know.”
“I wasn’t… It wasn’t like that.” His throat hurts, and he tries to swallow it, but a low, cold feeling spreads down into his gut. “I was just…”
“I know.”
“I didn’t give up. I was… I did it… It wasn’t like… like what Peter…”
“I know,” Bucky says again, infuriatingly calm.
Steve swallows again, and suddenly he hates this bed. He hates it: the warm caramel-colored duvet, the cotton sheets, the foam pillows and their matching caramel-colored covers. He hates the lamps, he hates the nightstands, and most of all he hates the way he wants to get up and bolt outside again—to the dog park, to the college track.
But he forgets—Bucky knows him, and he sees him, and without Steve saying another word, he says, “We don’t have to do anything tonight,” he says.
“No, I know,” Steve blurts out. “I wasn’t expecting you to—”
“Okay,” he says, quieter. “Well, just in case you were.”
“Okay,” Steve says.
More silence.
He lays into bed anyway, inching beneath the covers. Bucky leaves his arm out between them, and after a while Steve crawls right in. They used to do this when they were younger, too—back when there was no word for what they were and Bucky was courting a different girl every week and Steve was half-dead from rheumatoid fever or pneumonia or whatever else he’d caught that time.
Bucky’s his home. Always has been. And as he falls asleep, he can feel Bucky’s human hand still at his shoulder, warm and gentle, grazing up and down his arm.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 — 11:51 PM
All the way down the Medbay hall, the conference room door is closed; inside, Murdock is pacing back and forth without his cane as Nelson shouts.
The words don’t quite get through the shut door, but Tony can hear enough of it to understand that they’re arguing. He’s not sure what there is to argue about, but right now he doesn’t care. All he wants to do is sit by Peter’s door—just to be sure the kid’s still breathing. He sits a foot away on the Medbay floor, trying to go to sleep and utterly failing. How can he sleep knowing what happened today? What happened to Peter—what they have to keep doing to him?
Pepper finds him after a while, and nods with her head at Peter’s door. “You’re gonna wake him up like that,” she says. “He’ll hear you.”
She’s right. In this state, once the sedative wears off… Tony might as well be wearing an alarm clock sleeping outside of Peter’s door.
“Do you…” she starts, gnawing on her lip, and then she clasps her hands together. “You could sleep upstairs, if you want.”
He looks up at her, blinking. “Oh,” he says.
“Tonight,” she says, an afterthought.
Tony’s been up to the top floor before, of course. That’s where Pepper spends most of her time now, where they used to live together, but Tony typically stays down in the Medbay. He’s never gotten such an explicit invitation. “Um,” he says. “I mean, Peter, he might…”
“They’ve got medical staff here,” she says. “They’re monitoring him. And Cho’s here still, just a couple floors away. He’ll be okay.”
Cho had said she wanted them to be alone—Peter and Cassie—just to recuperate a little. “He might need me,” he says. “If he needs me…”
“…then you’re right upstairs,” she says, her voice a little softer. “Come on, Tony. You deserve some rest, too.”
He is tired, and he needs a shower, and when Pepper touches his arm he just follows her up. She scrapes together some toast and jam for him which he does reluctantly eat, and then he takes a quick shower.
He tapes up his nose, even though it’s still a little crooked, and tries his best to set it straight.
When Tony steps out, he finds some fresh clothes laid folded on the toilet, just a tank and some flannel pants. What he used to wear to bed—because now, he usually ends up falling asleep in his day clothes, just like he did in his lab.
Pepper’s already in bed.
She’s laying on her side facing the wall, tucked beneath the covers. She used to sleep on her stomach; he supposes she can’t now. The room is nearly dark, just the lamp on from his side of the bed, and he says, “The light…”
“Just leave it on,” he hears her say. He does, and then he climbs beneath the covers, finding it much more comfortable than the hospital cot. Softer, plushier, with a couple layers of velvety blankets and silk sheets.
He almost forgot what this was like.
Tony hears her feet shift under the covers. “I hated it,” she whispers towards the wall, “sleeping here without you.”
There’s an awkward silence there between them, drifting in the dark. Tony didn’t sleep while he was gone, nearly at all. Pepper slept alone. “I’m sorry,” she adds, “I know you didn’t—damn it. That’s nothing, compared to…”
“It’s something,” Tony says back.
The last time he slept in the same bed as Pepper, it was April. Peter was still stressing about school and making fun of his music and going out to dinner with May.
Pepper shifts again on the bed, this time, she turns around to face him; their faces only inches away on their pillows as she gets comfortable again. “Rhodey told me something was wrong,” she says, her voice strained and low. “Pretty much right away. Happy, too. Everyone kept telling me there had to be a reason you were doing it. And I just wish…” Tony watches her face stiffen, watches her eyes flit up to his and then down to his chest, where his arc reactor glows softly blue through his shirt. “I should’ve believed them. I should’ve let them help. I was just so mad…” She closes her eyes for a second; she’s always been good at that—keeping her thoughts locked in, keeping her face still. “I let my feelings get in the way of helping you, Tony, I should’ve known—”
“There’s no way you could’ve known,” he says back.
He thought a lot about that while he was in there. About sending a message to her—but he knew how that would end. Peter with a bullet in the back of the head. Peter with his throat slit. Peter with his skull cracked open.
He couldn’t tell her.
It’s too late now to think about the hypotheticals. What’s done is done. That van slammed into May’s Honda at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, and that was it. Tony shut himself away, Peter disappeared, and Pepper was left to pick up all of the pieces.
Five months ago, their problems were small. Fucking miniscule. Bank robberies and civil lawsuits. Biology exams and stuffy galas. School projects and too-long meetings.
There wasn’t much, honestly, that could cause Tony Stark pain. He knew pain. He did. He’d thought himself intimately familiar with the concept—of pain, of grief, of suffering, all of it.
He knew it well. He thought he was over it.
How fucking wrong he was.
He’d have begged for another boring meeting or another meet-and-greet with some asshole government official. He’d have fought the Avengers again a thousand times over—or he would’ve walked away from that fight with Barnes without blinking an eye. He’d have left the kid alone completely, if this is what it meant. If it meant saving him, of course he’d do it. Of course he would.
“I wish I could’ve told you,” he says. “Every single day, I wanted to. But with Peter…” She blinks at him in the dark. “...the way he was, I…”
“Yeah,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry, too.”
She turns over again so that her back is facing him and doesn’t say anything else. But after a few minutes of stiff silence, Pepper touches his hand, grabs it, and slowly pulls it over herself. He puts his forehead to her back. The curve of her back against his chest. His mouth against her shoulder. His broken nose against her strawberry blonde hair. He inhales, a little painful through his taped-up nose.
Lemon perfume. Conditioner and silk. Rosemary oil and fresh laundry.
She still smells the way she did six months ago.
Tony is standing in a room.
He’s holding something—when he looks down, he finds a gun. His gun. Seamless metal molded into the perfect handheld shape, glowing with a full, exquisite blue light—so bright it’s like a supernova.
It works. He knows it works. “I’m done,” he whispers, awed. “I—I did it.” He glances around the room but it’s still empty. “Charlie!” he shouts. “I did it! Charlie! It’s over! I—I did it! It’s over!” He sticks the barrel of the gun in the air and pulls the trigger—a blast of massive light erupts from the front and implodes on the ceiling in a blast of bruised smoke, vanishing as quickly as it came. “CHARLIE!”
When he turns again, there’s a chair in the center of the room. It reeks metallic, like years-old vibranium, and there’s something—someone—in it. The monotonous buzz of static grates at his ears, and he grasps the gun with now-sweating fingers. “Peter?” he says, and he swallows dryly, staggering forward towards that chair. The metal headrest blocks most of the kid’s head from view, but Tony knows it’s him. He can see his pale arms at the armrests, his blackish hair damp with blood. He staggers forward again, and there’s an impossible amount of steps between him and that chair. He keeps moving forward, and forward, until finally he reaches the arm of the chair, finding the kid’s arm strapped to it.“Peter, I’m here—I did it—” He scrambles at the kid’s arm, trying to find where the lock to the cuff is, prying at the metal lip with his fingernails. His arm’s a little cold. “I got you, buddy, you’re safe now, I promise you’re…”
He looks up at the kid, and the word dies on his tongue.
Blood. Peter’s head is more blood than skin, the left side a sunken gap baring fractured bone and bludgeoned brain—and still stuck halfway in is a hammer. The blood is dark and dried, coming off in flakes when Tony touches it gingerly. “No, no, no…” Tony whispers, and he seizes the hammer by its worn handle. Peter’s eyelids are half-open, half-closed, and he won’t meet Tony’s eyes. “No, you’re fine, you’re okay, you’re just…” He pulls at the hammer and it holds fast, making an ugly squelch as he pulls “I’m gonna fix it, Pete, just hold still, just hold…” Desperate, he yanks the hammer a third time, and a chunk of skull comes out with it, all crusted blood and wet flesh.
Peter’s chin drops to his chest, unmoving. New blood leaks through the cavity where the hammer was, murky and dark.
“No,” he says again, and the world lurches around him as he drops the hammer—it clatters against the cement floor. “No, no, no…” There are spots all over his hands—dark flakes of blood from the hammer, and he tries to wipe them off on his pants. When he looks back up, there’s more blood than before; leaking down the wide-open cavity that is Peter’s skull, his slack neck, his grayish skin, and his heart sinks into the pit of his stomach.
He’s too late.
The room warps around him—the walls bearing closer, the ceiling descending so close it brushes against the top of his head, and he can hear somewhere behind him there is a bearded man laughing. “No!” he screams, and he throws himself onto the chair, scrabbling uselessly at the metal cuffs. “I’m gonna get you out of here, kid, I promise, I—I swear to God—”
He turns frantically around, and the walls distorts in splays of humanoid shadows, all creeping towards him and Peter. He frantically pulls at the heavy trigger and bursts of blue light fill the dark room. “No! No! You can’t take him!”
In the corner of the room, one figure emerges from the dark and he’s laughing. Orange jumpsuit. Two broad hands. Huge brown eyes focused on him.
“NO!” Tony screams again, and he points the gun at the man; his hand is shaking. “Charlie, I did what you wanted… Please… Please let him go…”
The phone’s ringing again—ringing and ringing and ringing, and Tony staggers sideways, suddenly sick. “No… It’s… It’s over, it’s supposed to be…”
The man is visible now: bearded with a wide, grinning smile. “IT’S NOT OVER, STARK,” the man says, his voice grueling and cold. “IT’S NEVER OVER.”
“No… No…”
He smiles wider, an animalistic show of teeth, and a spread of sweat comes down the bearded man’s forehead. “IT’S NEVER—”
—and he’s awake again.
It’s dark, and Tony has no clue where he is, and his heart is racing at some inhuman pace that has him lurch suddenly up. Peter, he thinks vividly, and he can see the kid’s half-cracked skull in his mind again. Grayish skin. Half-closed eyes. Slack mouth.
He recoils at the thought, and he finds himself out of bed, tripping over himself, and he gives himself a half-second of recovery before he forces himself up to the wall—his desk? Where’s his desk? “The gun,” he chokes out, and he staggers over to his desk. He’s still drenched with sweat from the dream, and his hands won’t stay still, so he mutters, “Dum-E—Dum-E, mark—Mark thirty. Forty. Forty-five, calibrate, uh, calibrate—” His mind is a fucking mess, all images of Peter dead, Peter in the chair, Peter dead, Peter in the chair—until he has to force his hand to his head in some attempt to make it stop. The gun—he’s gotta get back to the gun, he’s gotta run through the last series of tests they did—when was the last time Riri was here? They’re coming to pick it up tomorrow, today, no, tomorrow, and it’s not finished yet. His heart flutters in his heaving chest, and he mumbles, “Where is it… Where…” while running his hands over his desk—a clatter of things fall to the ground, loose parts and old notes, and he sweeps his hands over the desk again, searching for the gun—it’s here somewhere, it has to be. Did they take it already? But they couldn’t have taken it—he’s not done. “I’m not done—not yet, not…” Equations flash through his mind, quickly, and he needs a pen, he needs a pen, he has to get this down—God, it might be the one thing that saves Peter. He scrambles his hands over the desk again and for a second he looks up and sees Charlie’s bearded face, his wide bloodshot eyes, his hands twitching at his sides, and Tony nearly trips backwards in shock.
Then the darkness starts to come into focus.
The lamp is still on, glowing softly from Tony’s side of the bed, because that’s where he is: a bedroom. Pepper’s bedroom. This desk is much too small to be a desk—it’s a vanity. Pepper’s vanity. On the floor—not loose screws and metal bits, but eye shadow palettes and concealer sticks. An orange tin of moisturizer, one he recognizes on sight. A bottle of micellar water. A tray of makeup brushes. And attached to the wall above the vanity is a mirror—in which Tony is staring at himself now, bearded and wide-eyed with twitching hands.
Behind him, he can see in the mirror, half-lit in the yellowed light—Pepper sitting up on the bed. “Tony?” she says, like she’s been saying it a while. “What are you doing?”
He stares at her, breathing hard. She looks real, much too real, like an oil painting or a home video. Her hair is tousled from sleep and there’s lines marking one side of her face from where she fell asleep in an array of intersecting lines.
“Tony,” she says, trying to get his attention. “Honey?”
It’s the honey that does it. The rest of the room comes to him, too. His shirt sticking damply to his chest, the arc reactor glowing in his chest, his beard itching against his face. Pepper sitting up in bed, half-beneath the covers, her face drawn with worry. “Pep,” he says weakly.
“Yeah,” she says, and her voice is tight. “What are you doing?”
He’s still standing beside the vanity; and he looks miserably down at all of her makeup—what he knocked down to the floor. His nose still hurts from that punch, and when he touches it gingerly with one finger, the pain worsens. “I, uh… I was just…” He picks up what he can, a little shaky in the process, and adds, “Sorry. Just… Was gonna go. Gotta check on him.”
She looks at him for half a second, then at the vanity, and then back to him. On her nightstand, there’s a small digital clock blinking bright green numbers: 2:21 AM. He was barely asleep for an hour or two. “Just come back to bed,” she says. “He’s fine—Cho’s—”
“I have to see him,” he insists, and he blinks away another image of Peter in his mind: hammer buried half-deep in his head, sunken eyes fixed on the wall before him, blood long-dried down his temple. “What if he’s…”
“He’s okay,” she insists. “We have the camera—”
“I’m not checking the fucking camera,” he blurts. “I need—I need to see him.”
He tries to find a sweatshirt in the dresser, or a robe, or at least some decent pants, but Pepper says, “We can’t. You walk down there, and we can’t be sure he’ll go to sleep again. He needs the rest, Tony, and so do you.”
She’s right. She’s usually right.
If he walks down there right now, his footsteps will wake Peter as soon as he steps off the elevator. It doesn’t make sense for him to go down there—at best, it’ll scare Peter before he goes back to sleep, and at worst… He hates himself, suddenly, for being so selfish; it’s his fault this whole hearing shocked Peter so badly, and it’s his fault they had to sedate him just to get him back inside. He has to let him sleep.
Pepper calls him back to bed again, and this time he goes. She pulls up the camera feed on her laptop, and they watch from her bed the fine-grained screen.
Peter’s room is mostly empty.
There’s no one else in the room, just Peter and Cassie. No nurses, no doctors, not even Maggie Paxton and her husband. The bed is neatly made and most of the medical supplies has been cleared away. At first glance, Tony thinks the kids must be gone, but then he spots a mass on the right side of the hospital bed on the floor. "There they are," Pepper whispers, confused, and she taps the corner of the screen where Tony is already looking. Someone must’ve dragged the blankets off the bed, because in the corner in a pile of blankets and pillows, sound asleep, are both kids. They’re half-hidden in the blankets and lying on the floor, Peter closer to the camera—and the door—whereas only a sliver of Cassie is visible, shielded by the boy, the wall, and the bed beside them.
She’s almost entirely hidden by Peter’s body—if not for the camera’s spot high on the wall, Tony wouldn’t even know she was there. Peter’s arm is crooked over Cassie’s back, and the little girl is curled into his chest like she fits there, her casted arm tucked carefully between them.
This is how they slept in the bunker. That’s what they’ve assumed. Tony's seen the state of his back—the scarring there—and they can all connect the dots. He laid that way to protect her from the open door that so frightened him. He turned his back to the one thing that could hurt him, just to provide some sense of safety to that little girl, even if it didn’t last long.
Tony touches the television screen. Tears prick at his eyes, and he touches it again, this time with the whole of his palm. The glass is smooth and warm, like the television in his lab upstate. This one’s a little older, the glass a little thicker, a little curved.
The kids look calm like this, at peace—like they’re at home in the bunker again.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 — 7:45 AM
The following day, Jimmy Woo gets a call from his old sergeant back in California.
They’re offering him a new position. Sergeant, actually, of the S.H.I.E.L.D. division in San Francisco. Double his current pay, better benefits and housing stipends, and he’ll be working directly with vigilantes and other enhanced in the Bay area. It’s a great job—a perfect job, even.
Woo takes the call in his bathroom, and when the man asks if he’ll take the job, he cracks open the door and stares into the bathroom at his still-sleeping wife. He thinks of Julia Keene’s closed casket funeral; of Peter Parker on broken knee before Keene; of five soldiers massacred in their cells; of another ten desecrated bodies buried on Mount Washington and scattered across four states.
He thinks of Charlie Keene’s missing hand. Tony Stark’s twitching fingers. Peter Parker’s burnt ear. His daughter is eight—nearly Cassie Paxton-Lang’s age.
At this point, Jimmy has only two options: one, try to get Ross persecuted on the word of his college-age assistant, his dead colleague, and a hunch, and face the consequences.
Or two, keep his family safe.
“I’ll take it,” Jimmy says, and his sergeant on the other line congratulates him, rambling for a while about sign-on bonuses and leadership and their responsibilities as ‘defenders of the community’ and ‘keepers of the peace.’ “Thank you, sir.”