BITE
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 — 8:09 AM
Pepper forgot to set her alarm.
She likes to wake up at seven every morning—to get everything done before the nurses get Peter up at seven-thirty. But today when she gets up, Tony is still asleep, head sunk into his pillow, tangled up in the covers. He moved a lot in his sleep last night, kept muttering and shifting and turning from side to side, so she didn’t get to sleep until late—she’s on maybe four hours of sleep right now, and although she’s still exhausted she has to get to work. There’s some dried blood spotting the pillow case where his nose is, and even in the darkened room she can see it’s gotten worse,
The sun is up already but the shades are drawn, so the room is still somewhat dark. She slips out from under the covers and opens her dresser, finding a shirt and some pants, and sneaks out without waking Tony. He doesn’t usually sleep well, at least not as soundly as he is now. “FRIDAY,” she says, once she shuts the door behind her into the bathroom, “let me know when he wakes up, will you?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
She’s got some work messages from last night, so she responds to a couple of those and then messages a nurse from the Medbay floor, instructing her to get a look at Tony’s broken nose as soon as he wakes up. She scrolls through her emails, too, and ignores most of them—reporters, mostly, all begging for interviews and quotes, all aching for their five minutes of fame. She finds one email from the family court about Peter’s custody hearing a few days from now, one confirming that Peter won’t have to be there. As long as we have access to his medical files and a professional present who can speak to the extent of his incapacity, Mr. Parker is not required to attend.
Currently, they’re only acting guardians as part of an emergency temporary custody agreement that only lasts sixty days from the day he was rescued. It’s been exactly one month since then, and it’s about time to update the agreement. Murdock’s helped her with most of the paperwork for a standby guardianship, and it shouldn’t take much to turn it official—one that should legally last until May is well again. On top of everything else, she doesn’t want them worrying about this, too.
She emails back that she and Tony will both be there, as well as some of Peter’s medical staff. Helen, maybe, or Sarah. They can’t afford to screw up his custody—maybe she’ll bring them both.
Pepper eats a quick breakfast—lemon-flavored yogurt and granola with a host of orange slices—and downs a mug of coffee after that. She takes her prenatals, and her blood pressure meds, and afterwards she sits at her kitchen counter alone and tries her best to breathe. In and out, in and out, although it isn’t much help. In just over a month, she’s going to have this baby whether she likes it or not; she’s already got Peter and Tony and Cassie and a whole damn company to worry about without a baby on top of that. Tony’s baby. Her baby. How the hell is she supposed to do this?
An odd feeling in her stomach, like a flutter by her belly button. Then another one a moment later, sightly to the left, like a tickle. A kick. “Sorry, honey,” she says, smoothing her palm over her stomach. “I’m trying.” Another kick, as though in spite, and then her baby seems to calm.
There’s a text message from Matt, too, and she clicks it open on her laptop: [Hey Pepper need a signature from Peter for the judge I drafted up the document and Foggy can notarize…] She skims the rest. It’s just Matt explaining the rest of the legal comprehension document, and he’s attached its PDF to the message, too. It reads United States District Court at the top and Criminal Complaint right below it and states something about enhanced law and accusers and charges against persons stated below, and at the very end of the first page it states: I declare that I have read this charge and that the statements in it are true to the best of my knowledge and belief. I understand that making willfully false statements can be punished by fine and imprisonment. And below that, are fifty-some pages detailing the exact counts and natures of his crimes. This one’s just Charlie’s, by the look of it.
Pepper’s dealt with a fair amount of legal matters as part of Stark Industries, but never anything federal—and certainly not anything like this.
Her phone buzzes. Another PDF from Matt, this time the complaint document for another one of the Stark Seven.
She prints the first document out, and reads it carefully before writing out her own contact information instead of Peter’s—it’s not like he has a phone, or a computer, or any way to respond if they contacted him. Then she pulls up one of Peter’s old internship file and searches for a signature. She finds one on his offer letter—a scribble of his name that doesn’t look too complicated—copies it a few times onto a piece of paper, and then signs Peter’s name in messy cursive directly onto the document.
Then she pulls up the next form, prints it out, and signs again.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 — 8:32 AM
Cassie hasn’t left her brother’s side since he came back.
And he came back weird. Really weird. He’s very quiet, like how he usually is when he comes back, but he’s not bleeding. He hasn’t had water poured on him and he doesn’t have those ashy marks on his head either. She checks him over a few times, but she can’t find anything new on him, except maybe his leg which the doctor bandaged up.
(Not their doctor, she thinks. The new doctor—a lady with black hair. Cassie doesn’t mind her.)
They’ve found this spot between the bed and the wall that feels almost like home; Cassie dragged their blankets and sheets into the corner and tossed them there so Peter wouldn’t be cold. He’s been laying in the corner, his head by the wall, his spine curved, his head tipped forward. Cassie tucks the blanket over his shoulders, makes sure it covers his socked feet, and gives him a little kiss on the side of his head like Daddy used to do to her.
His eyes are closed, but Cassie knows he’s awake just by the way he’s breathing. He’s just tired, that’s all. Charlie sometimes makes him tired like this, or Mr. Beck, or any of the others. She can only imagine what happened out there—what Charlie did to him this time.
(She knew they weren’t safe here. Not with Mommy, not with Jim, not with Mr. Stark. Peter always said so. The lady in the pink scrubs always tells her no one will hurt her in this new room. That the bad guys are gone, that they’re locked away, and that no one will hurt her again.
But people lie—everyone lies.
The only person who tells her the truth is Peter, and they took him away from her just like Charlie did.)
Right now it’s breakfast time, but Peter’s still laying down like he’s sleeping. She can smell it as soon as it gets closed—and she imagines the smell curling towards her like tendrils of smoke, like a cartoon. It smells so yummy that her mouth fills with saliva just at the thought of it, and she wants to eat so bad that she wants to lunge to the door as soon as it opens.
But she can’t leave her brother like this, not even if she’s hungry.
What if they take him away again? What if this time, they really do kill him? (Cassie’s thought about this many, many times: what happens when they finally kill Peter. She thinks it won’t be long after that they’ll kill her, too. That’s what Peter says. Once he dies, he said, they won’t need her anymore, so they’ll probably kill her too.)
Four knocks on the door: that means it’s Mommy. She hears her voice on the other side, but she keeps her mouth shut. Quiet, just like Peter taught her. It’s just Mommy but still Cassie’s scared, and there’s a weird feeling in her chest, a fast thumping. She remembers Mommy being angry, but she can’t remember… Did Mommy ever hit her or kick her or throw her to the ground? Did she ever lock her in her room or throw her to the ground or stick her with a needle?
She’s not sure. She’s really, really not sure.
The door creaks open slowly, and a familiar blonde head pokes in. “Hi, sweetheart. Is it okay if I come in? Got your breakfast…” She nudges the door open a little further with her hip, and it’s oh, it’s there: there on a plastic tray, in several metal cans, is her breakfast, just like Mommy said. She’s sitting on the floor still with Peter, so she can’t see what’s in them, but oh can she smell it, and her mouth waters and waters and waters. Potatoes, maybe. Fruit. Eggs. She wants it all.
“Yeah,” Cassie whispers, breathless with the thought of food, and she’s already imagining herself devouring the whole can as Mommy shuts the door behind her.
The hunger becomes her, consuming every thought she ever had a second ago about Peter and Charlie and how scary Mommy was when she was mad. She climbs over Peter, As soon as Mommy puts the tray in front of her, she grabs that can. She eats fast, so fast that she doesn’t even realize she’s done until Mommy is trying to tug the can away from her hands.
They eat the rest of breakfast together, Mommy and her, which makes Cassie feel a little better—like she and Peter used to. Another nurse comes in a little later, dressed in light blue scrubs with a white long sleeved shirt underneath it. She has dark brown hair and Cassie doesn’t remember her name. Peter’s not usually bothered by her, though, so Cassie doesn’t mind her.
“Where’s Peter’s breakfast?” she asks Mommy, who is rubbing her eyes.
“Oh, I think they’re just…” Mommy looks over at Peter. “Waiting until he wakes up.”
“He’s awake,” she insists. “He needs his breakfast.”
“I’m sure they’ll give him something,” Mommy says. “Come on—let’s play something.”
She and Mommy draw with her crayons together, but it’s really hard to draw or think when that nurse is so close to Peter.
The nurse is kneeling by Peter now, wrapping something around his arm, and Cassie’s chest starts to thump again. “Mommy,” she whispers, “is she gonna…” …scream at him? Hurt him? Stick him with a needle? She pulls something from her bag, a strip of fabric that she wraps around his arm; she presses a button that inflates the fabric, waits, and then deflates it with a hiss.
Cassie feels like she’s standing at the edge of a bridge; every part of her skin prickles as she watches the woman touch Peter—stick a plastic thing in his ear, shine a light into his eyes, adjust the plastic thing in the top of his arm and connect a tube to it that fills with clearish liquid. She doesn’t like when they do stuff to Peter. Mateo used to do stuff like that—wrap a rubber band around his arm or his leg, inject him with medicine that made him sleepy, that kept him slow and made him quiet. Mateo’s dead now, that’s what Peter told her. Megan, too. How do you know? she asked him.
“I can hear them,” he says. He’s feeling sick that day and sitting right next to the toilet, holding his head in his hands like it hurt. He had a couple marks on his head, ashy ones at the sides of his forehead and by his jaw, and he was shutting his eyes. His hair trailed down to his jaw and tickled his eyebrows, and his jumpsuit was mostly clean.
“Who?”
He gestures generally towards their door, his eyes still closed. “They’re all…talking.”
“What happened?”
A wrinkle between his eyebrows as he thinks. He’s a good listener, her big brother—he can hear all the way outside and everything they say or do. Sometimes he knows what they’re going to do to him before they take him away, just because he can hear the sound of the crowbar scraping against floor, or of a set of knives being unfolded onto a metal tray. “Car crash,” he says after a while. “I think. Hard to hear with the news on…” He’s still listening. “Yeah. Both of them. Died on impact.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means you die… right away, I guess. Like it didn’t hurt for very long.”
“Like one minute?”
“No, like less.”
“Like one second?”
“Yeah, I guess. Maybe less than that.”
That’s probably a good way of dying, Cassie thinks. On impact. She hopes when Charlie gets her it’s like that. Really fast, less than one second, and it doesn’t hurt. “How many now?” she asks.
“Cassie…”
“How many?”
He makes that noise at her—a little annoyed, and he opens his eyes to briefly glare at her. “I don’t know…”
“We were at thirteen, right? And then Lyle died, you said, right? Right?”
His eyes are shut again. “Cassie…”
“So thirteen…” Minus one and minus another two… “That’s ten. Ten left.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not that many,” she says. She crawls to the door and looks at it the way Peter does, tilting her head like he does, staring down all its cracks and corners, trying to find something wrong with it. “Maybe now we can try again?”
His voice is very sharp, like fingernails on skin. “No.”
“But that doctor said—”
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he says. “I said no, Cass.”
“But—”
Peter’s eyes flit open with a bitter glare and she immediately shuts her mouth. His face looks odd with those marks on it. She’s not sure what they are, and Peter won’t tell her. Burns, maybe, because they have that blotchy, shiny look to it, and the skin is redder than the rest. “Quiet game,” he says. “Now.”
Cassie spends the rest of the night in silence, thinking up mean ways to get back at him, before she loses her grudge to exhaustion and curls up next to him to sleep.
Mr. Tony comes by after breakfast and tries to talk to Peter; like the nurses and Mommy, he doesn’t seem to understand. “He’s tired,” she reminds him, and the man looks briefly at her. His hair is all frizzy from sleep still, and his beard is a little sideways, like Charlie’s gets sometimes. “He’s tired!”
Sometimes she thinks Mr. Tony is like Mr. Beck, but he doesn’t do any of that stuff that usually frightens her. Mostly she thinks he’s like Haroun. He comes in to their room, talks to Peter, makes weird faces, and says “sorry” a lot. And yesterday he took Peter away to go see Charlie.
The man spends a little while speaking to him, pushing the food tray closer, and sits beside him for a while longer in silence before giving up and walking out.
Peter’s breakfast tray sits by Peter for a long time enough, that his food gets cold and its intoxicating smell grows dull. When the nurse reaches to take it away, Cassie grabs for it, and Mommy scolds her, pulling her away by the wrist. “Sweetheart, if you want more, you can ask.”
Cassie scratches at her Mommy’s hand and screeches until she lets go, and spends the rest of her morning hiding with Peter in the corner and playing pretend.
She’s the doctor this time, and Peter is just Peter, and she spends the time asking if this hurts or that hurts or if he needs more medicine. The doctor’s dead too, just like the rest of them; Cassie’s heard them say it. She’s a good listener, just like her brother.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 — 11:49 AM
All day, Peter hasn’t moved. He hasn’t sat up, not even to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. He’s unbearably quiet—hasn’t spoken to Cassie, either, just curled up in that corner and stayed there with his back to the door. Tony tries all morning to talk to him, but the kid won’t even open his eyes to look at him, let alone acknowledge he’s there. He’s barely acknowledging Cassie at all.
At lunchtime, he’s still lying down in the spot they left him; the little girl sits beside him, quickly eating her own meal, but the kid won’t turn around to even look at the tray. Cassie keeps eyeing Peter’s tray like it’s filled with precious gems, and tries several times to snatch it from Tony’s hands. “No—Cassie!” says the girl’s mother. “Cassie, baby, you’ve had yours, you can’t have anymore…”
Tony knows they have to be specific about what the kids can and can’t have, because of their weight issues, but Cassie just keeps trying to take it whenever he gets too close.
“Cassie,” the woman says, a warning, “That’s not yours. It’s Peter’s.”
The little girl scowls at her.
At some point the kid gets up, sits up for a couple seconds, and goes over to the bathroom. Then he returns to the same spot and curls up there like he never left. The little girl climbs over him, whispers into his ear, and then draws the blanket over him.
By the afternoon, Sarah gets somewhat close to the kid, crouches by him, and tries to catch his attention. “Peter,” she says gently, “Peter, do you know where you are?”
Nothing.
The kid’s eyes open a little and he blinks blearily, muttering something neither he nor Sarah can hear and then shutting his eyes again. They can’t even get his attention, let alone a couple words out of him.
“How about the date, Peter?”
Again, nothing as he lays with his back to the door. He is ominously still—a curled-up corpse, and Cassie climbs over him to fetch one of her stuffed animals, shooting scowls at both of them. “He’s tired,” the little girl says through gritted teeth, “he’s tired!” She grabs for the boy’s limp hand and clutches it.
God, he’s not eating. He’s not speaking. He’s barely moving at all. What the hell were they thinking, bringing him to that hearing? What did they think was gonna happen?
“How about the date, Peter?” Sarah asks gently, as the little girl glares at her. “Peter?”
Neither of them bother to ask him for his name—they know they won’t get an answer.
“He wouldn’t eat this morning,” says Sarah, standing up as they walk out of the room. She looks disappointed—not with Peter, maybe, but with the situation, how the day has gone so far. “I think… He’s just confused. Overwhelmed. That was a lot for him, all at once.”
As they go, Peter is still in the same position that they left him in, lying on his side, and a nurse is crouching beside him. The nurse realigns the tube on Peter’s face, checks its length, and asks him to open his mouth a few times before doing it herself, pulling open his jaw so she can look inside. Then she cleans the tip of a wide feeding syringe, bends the tube into a soft curve, and pushes the syringe into the end of the plastic tube before pressing down on the plunger. The syringe is filled with a whitish-cream colored liquid and she holds it around Peter’s head, allowing the liquid to flow through and up the tube up his nostril.
The nurse stays for a few minutes on her knees, holding the tube as the liquid slowly drains all the way into the nasogastric tube.
And still Peter doesn’t move.
Afterward, Helen gathers them in the conference room—Tony and Pepper, Sarah and Happy, too.
“I don’t understand,” says Pepper. “What’s wrong with him? Is it the medication? Is he sick again?”
“There’s nothing medically wrong with him,” Helen explains. “He’s just recovering from what happened. We just need to…give him some time, that’s all.”
Pepper has her laptop open on the table, and she’s staring intently at it. “So this is the, um…” She scrolls a little on her computer. “The delirium, right? That’s why it’s lasting so long?”
“Well,” Helen says, “no, not exactly. What Peter’s going through… It’s not caused by drugs, or pain… What he’s experiencing now is purely psychological. Same kind of disassociation, unresponsiveness, like he’s displayed before.”
“But you’ve still got him on his medications?”
“Yes,” she answers. “Venlafaxine to help with the panic, morphine for the pain, baclofen for his muscles—a muscle relaxant—”
“But the sedative,” says Pepper, still glancing back and forth between Cho and her laptop screen. “That—that can cause delirium, right?”
“Not like this. I gave him some ativan last night, some eszopiclone to help him sleep… But that all should’ve worn off by now, Pepper, and none of them would cause him to act like this.”
“But without any food—”
“I’ve been supplementing all day,” she says. “His NG tube is still functional, so we’ve been getting nutrients in him that way until he can do it again himself.”
“Well, take him to see May,” Pepper suggests. “That usually helps, doesn’t it?”
“He’s not getting up from the floor, Pepper. He’s not going to go out into that hallway unless we drag him out there.”
Nearly a month ago, Tony watched as that doctor in New Hampshire explained what was happening to Peter. You might want to go, she said, as the nurse got ready to insert that thin plastic tube up his nose. Back then, he barely knew the little girl and he’d just met her parents and he was still reeling from the fact that Pepper was pregnant and that Peter was finally free.
But Peter was supposed to be better now. He had been better, up until they dragged him out of his safe place and into that courthouse. Now that girl is staring daggers at all of them like they’re one of Charlie’s guys, Peter’s fucking comatose, and even Tony can’t go to sleep without feeling like he’s waking up in that lab upstate.
“...some mild regression,” Cho is saying to Pepper, “but it’s not the end of the world. He’s still—”
“Not the end of the world?” Tony echoes, incredulous, and the anger comes easy as he looks at the woman, standing up fast. “Not the end of the world? Helen he hasn’t eaten a damn thing! He won’t talk! He won’t eat! He won’t even sit up! Don’t tell me it’s not the end of the world when he was up and talking twenty-four hours ago and now he’s trying to fucking starve himself to death!”
A beat.
“I don’t think he’s doing it on purpose,” the woman says carefully.
Tony realizes now how close he is to Helen—how she has shrunk herself in her seat, how she’s tensed and he’s standing a foot away from her, his fists balled up tight.
He takes a step back. And another. “Sorry,” he says quickly. “Sorry.”
Across the room, Pepper’s eyes are on him. Before Helen can say anything else, Tony turns on his heel and goes.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 — 3:35 PM
Because today is just like the last. Peter refuses all of his food—doesn’t even bother to look at the tray. At some point he gets up for the bathroom, but only after Cassie has prodded him several times.
“You promised,” she whispers to her brother, touching his arm. “Peter. Peter…”
She can’t leave Peter like this. He needs her. Sometimes, he always said, I’m not gonna be here to protect you.
She knew what he meant. When Charlie dragged him away or when they gave him too much of that sleep medicine or when he was hurt so bad he couldn’t move. She dabbed a cloth to the spot to the spot on his shoulder. It was a cut—a deep one, and she watched it carefully. She’d learned to do this, to keep his wounds clean, to watch them for infection, to leave the scabs alone so they’d heal faster.
And when that happens, he said, you’re gonna have to be the grown-up.
So Cassie’s the grown up now, because Peter is too tired.
And because Peter’s bad leg is worse than usual, Cassie pries up the bandages to look at it. This is her job when Peter can’t do it himself. She remembers the blood when the doctor brought him back yesterday. He was very sleepy, and he smelled like blood and sweat—like her Peter. She peels up part of the bandage and checks for infection like Peter taught her—for pink skin or weird colors or getting warm.
“Cassie,” says Mommy, and she reaches over, touching Cassie’s arm, “Cassie, stop that.”
She doesn’t want to make her too angry, so she waits until Mommy is busy talking to that man Mr. Tony and returns to her brother. She peeks beneath the bandage and his knee looks better than it did yesterday. Clean, no infection, and it’s not as big and red as it was yesterday. That’s good. What’s an infection? Cassie asked him when he explained what she should do.
It’s like…when you get hurt, he explained, and the spot where you get hurt gets sick.
Like a cold?
No, more like—like the flu. Like a fever. You know what a fever is?
Yes, she said, smiling. Like this! And she put her hand on his forehead like Mommy used to do to her. Her palm, and then her knuckles, and then her palm again.
Peter’s face wrinkled, tightened. Yeah, he said. Like that. I need you to check for me, you think you can do that?
She had the flu once, she thinks, but it’s hard to remember. Maybe she was sick here. Maybe it was Peter who gave her long sips of gatorade, not Daddy. She’s not sure. She puts her palm then on Peter’s forehead, and then her knuckles, and then palm again. He feels pretty normal to her, but still her mind wanders—what happened to him out there? What did they do to him? She pictures Charlie with that huge hammer, with his bugged-wide eyes and her heart beats quickly in her chest, thumping, thumping, thumping, and she whispers to him, “Was it Charlie?”
Her brother doesn’t respond, so this time she crawls over him and lays down the way he is, and she whispers it to his closed eyes—to his scarred face. “Peter,” she whispers. “It was Charlie, right? He found us?”
Peter’s eyes blink open then: an inky pitch like spreading tar. He watches her for a moment, and then he shuts his eyes again, letting out a strained sigh.
Charlie, then. It must’ve been. She finds his hand with hers and holds it really tight.
“They took you to see Charlie?”
He’s muttering again, and he’s getting kind of hard to understand but he squeezes her hand back.
How could Mr. Tony do that to Peter? How could Mommy do that to her? She stares up at her mother, who’s now pressing a hand to her forehead as she speaks to Mr. Tony with his messy black beard. You took him away, she thinks viciously, you hurt him— Her mommy is looking less like Mommy and more like the red-haired lady, who used to fold her arms just like that. Mommy takes Peter’s food away. Mommy wants to take her food away. Mommy will rip her away from Peter and drag her to see Charlie, just like Mr. Tony did.
She squeezes Peter’s hand then: tighter and tighter and tighter.
They’re not getting enough food.
Even Cassie knows that. Happy Meals are for kids, and Peter’s not a kid—that’s why he has to eat some of hers at every meal, which means they’re both hungry. Starved, enough that Cassie spends her day drinking water from the tap and her nights dreaming of carrot cake and strawberry danishes and chocolate chip cookies.
She’d do anything, anything, just for another bite.
“Can you ask for more food next time?” she begs Peter. “I’m hungry.”
Peter gnaws on his lip for a second; a sliver of pale skin peels away from his lip and he gnaws, gnaws, swallows. His shirt is sticky on one side, glued a little to some cut they made on him yesterday, and his leg has especially bothered him today, so he hasn’t stood up once, not even for the bathroom.“I’ll try,” he says, and his lip has a dot of blood on it now. “No promises, okay?”
When Mommy says ‘no promises,’ it means yes. So they’re gonna get more food! She hopes for banana bread, Jim used to make banana bread for her, and she pictures the smell, how warm and delicious, sitting at the kitchen table with a plate and fork, crumbs everywhere. She’d eat it however they gave it to her. Plate or no plate. Fork or no fork. She’d eat it straight off the floor as long as she got a piece.
“Let me do the talking,” he says, “okay? If you talk to them they might… Just let me do the talking.”
Cassie has learned not to ask why; Peter is usually right about these things. “
So the next time the guards come with their food, Peter thrusts his hand straight through the food slot and grabs the nearest guard’s arm. “Just a little more food,” he says, “please, a little more would help.” Cassie is hiding beneath the bed as a precaution, but still she perks up at the thought of extra food—whatever it is. Apple slices. Chicken nuggets. Another mustard-covered burger, even, as long as they gave let her take a delicious bite. “Anything you could spare, please. I know you don’t want us to starve and we’re really not getting enough to eat—”
“Move the hand, Parker,” says a female guard, and Cassie can see the guy flex his fingers, trying to pull his arm back but Peter sticks and grasps hard, and the guy keeps pulling and yelling for someone to help him.
“Please,” he says, “I know you’re a good guy. We’re just hungry—please, we’re just not getting enough—”
This time, their room’s thick metal door screeches open, and there’s a woman, pointing a gun down at Peter, and he freezes at the sight of the weapon, staring up at the barrel of the gun like it’s the first time he’s seen it. Cassie has a memory then of her mother freezing like that at the sight of a gun, then spinning around and screaming for her to run.
The woman in the doorway is tall and dark-skinned, and she looks down at them with a mixture of distaste and irritation. Daria, she thinks. That’s her name. “Let go of him,” she says, and she gives the gun a slight wave, Peter’s eyes following it as it moves.
Cassie is thinking about food when Peter responds, and she slowly crawls out from under the bed, trying to see what Daria’s brought them. Happy Meals, sure, but what else? What will they bring? Ice cream, maybe, or apple pie or birthday cake. She loves birthday cake. She pokes her head up and sees Daria there, towering above Peter, who is still elbow-deep into the food slot and still clinging tightly to the man’s wrist.
“...until we get some more food,” Peter is saying. “We’re hungry.”
Daria takes another step into the cell, and quickly Peter ducks his head, dodging nothing. “Give it up, Parker,” she spits, as Cassie sneaks further up to the guard. Does she have food in her pockets? Maybe in that bag she has slung over her shoulder, or maybe somewhere behind her. Oh, please let it be something good. She’s so, so hungry. “Let him go, or I’ll tell Charlie you’re being difficult.”
“No, no—we need more food than this—we won’t survive!”
“I said let him the fuck go, Parker!”
“You’re starving us—we’re gonna die before you even get the chance to get your stupid weapon!”
“Talk back to me again and I’ll blow your fucking brain out! Let go of him!”
Then Daria’s eyes flick towards Cassie, her gaze refocusing on the shadow creeping up the wall, and a smile creeps onto her face.
Peter twists his neck to follow her gaze, and spots her in her new spot near the door, and his eyes get a little bigger. “Cassie,” he says, shock dawning on him, and in the same moment that Peter lets go of the other guard, Daria lunges at her so fast that she doesn’t have time to react, fumbling for her arm and getting a hard grip on the back of her shirt, yanking her backwards as Cassie shrieks for the only person who can help her: “Peter! PETER!”
Above her, the woman’s hand with the gun raises up, and a hard shock of pain crashes into the side of her head, and everything goes murky and she’s suddenly very tired. The ceiling tilts diagonal above her—Peter screaming her name—and Daria's hand clutching at the back of her shirt.
She doesn't remember falling asleep.
When she wakes, she’s laying down on her back and her tears come unbidden along with this gross feeling in her chest like she’s gonna throw up. “My head,” she whispers, because it hurts, and it hurts, and she just wants her mommy here to kiss it better.
But there is instead someone else holding her, and her head is on something soft—his leg, and he’s cradling her in his lap and stroking the hair away from her eyes.
Peter.
“Mommy…” she mumbles, and her face is all wet and the boy in her swimming vision dries her wet cheeks with his fingers. “Daddy! ” She cries and she cries but Mommy never comes, just Peter, and her head hurts so bad she thinks it might be split in half. No Mommy, just Peter, and he shushes her and holds her and tells her not to move too much or her head will keep hurting.
The boy shushes her, and he's holding something—a tiny speck between his fingers. She knows the smell, and she knows the taste as the boy pushed it past her lips—half a pill Ava gave them a while ago. She gags at the taste but swallows, and it barely helps. “Crying will help,” he whispers. “Just quiet, okay? Quiet, quiet…” The whole night, though, he lets her tuck her face into his shoulder and his shirt stinks like blood, like metal, and it’s got holes all over it.
For the whole next day, they’re hungry. Starving until Cassie is crying because her tummy hurts and Peter just keeps saying he’s sorry, he’s sorry, and then they take him and he comes back and says he’s sorry again. Cassie cries and cries until she doesn’t have a breath left in her body, cries until Peter’s shirt is wet with her tears and her head hurts bad again but all she throws up is weird-smelling water. The following night, he’s begging them for anything, just some fries or a burger or anything at all, and at last the night comes and Daria is back.
She opens the door to the cell and stands in the light like a ghost. She’s tall and her shadow is tall, too, spreading all the way across the floor of their room. Her arm moves, and there it is midair: bright red and yellow cardboard, and their Happy Meals crash onto the floor; one opens, the wrapped-up burger rolling out onto the concrete floor. “Try any shit like that again,” she says coldly, “and you’ll see what I can do to you.”
“Thank you,” Peter says, and he snatches up the boxes, drawing them quickly back to the bedside. “I’m sorry—I’m really, really sorry.”
“Fucking spoiled brat,” Daria huffs and slams the doors shut. They hear the lock turn.
He lets her eat all of her meal that night, and then falls asleep beside her, letting her curl into his chest for comfort. After that, they don’t ask for any more food. They don’t ask for any more anything. Ever. Anything extra that they get is a gift, a blessing, and all they should say is thank you.
That night, when her head doesn’t hurt so bad, Peter tells her he's gonna teach her something new. A secret code—like for spies and superheroes. “We need something so you know I’m not joking, that I’m not saying something just because. The next time this happens—I need you to listen to me, okay, Cassie?”
He’s right. If she had gone under the bed when Peter told her to, Daria wouldn’t have hit her. Her head wouldn’t hurt so bad. “Okay,” she whispers back.
So they come up with code words, one at a time. Iron Man, for when she should hide beneath the bed. Hawkeye when she should cover her ears. Black Widow when she needs to be quiet. Ant-man when she would run.
They’re all superheroes, Peter says, so they’ll be easy to remember. “You think you can remember that?”
“Yes,” she says, although her head still hurts.
“You promise?”
“Pinky swear,” she says, and even lying down he links his pinky in hers.
He quizzes her the next day, and the next day, until she knows the code words so well that she scratches them into the wall just because. Until next time, when Peter shouts their code word and Cassie gets under the bed this time. And he teaches her other things to do, too. How to make herself scarier, how to make them leave her alone. “You gotta be brave for me, Cassie, because I’m not always gonna be there, okay? Can you do that?”
Mommy hasn’t been here to hold her. Mommy doesn’t shush her, or hold her, or dab away her tears from her face, or teach her how to protect herself.
But Peter did.
Mommy didn’t warn her that the bad guys would be like this. That they would give them food and take it away and give it back again when they said thank you. She didn’t warn her that life could be like this—that it would hurt and hurt and all she could do was bear it and be brave and hope it didn’t happen again.
But Peter….
Peter did.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 — 6:27 PM
They’ve been stealing Peter’s food all day, and Cassie knows what she has to do. Otherwise, Peter will starve and die—and if he dies, well, she’ll die, too. That’s what Peter always says, and he’s always right. If he dies, she dies. If he dies, she dies.
She wishes Daddy were here. He would understand. He’s dead, like Mateo and Megan and the rest of them. He died quick, that’s what Mommy said, in a split second. On impact. She doesn’t think much about it, Peter always said that Daddy was pretty much dead anyway.
When dinner comes, both the lines on the clock are pointed at the six. She’s still not sure what that means, and Mommy hasn’t taught her, and Peter’s too tired to show her now. Six, right? Six o’clock? Six is almost seven, and seven usually means time to take Peter away, but that doesn’t usually happen in this new room. Dinner smells really good, and when Mommy brings the tray to her, one of the cans is filled with sliced chicken and green beans, a second with rice. She eats quick, and when that man Mr. Tony brings the tray to Peter she jumps at it, snatching up the two cans but one spills all over the ground—all before they have the chance to take it away again.
“Cassie!” snaps Mommy and she’s angry so she might take Cassie and shake her by the hair—that will hurt. If Mommy or Dr. Alexis or Jim wants to hurt her, then she can handle it. She’s brave—she’s a grown-up today, so she can take it.
Cassie drags the two extra cans behind her as Mommy comes towards her—and Cassie’s thoughts are ricocheting inside her skull, and her mind is all panic and more panic and everything becomes clear—Mommy moving closer to her, the pink-scrubbed doctor behind her, and they’re trying to kill Peter. She screeches, “NO! GO AWAY! GO AWAY!” And all she’s thinking is Mommy who let Renee take her, Mommy who took Peter away, Mommy who brought her brother back bleeding. “I WON’T—LET YOU—”
“Cassie, baby, calm down—“
Mommy’s gonna grab her by the throat, Mommy’s gonna pin her down and stab her with a needle and it’s gonna hurt —a surge of ice cold panic hits her in a rush, like water poured down her back, “PETER! PETER!” She shoves herself into the farthest corner of the room, her brother’s corner, all the way behind Peter, and she shakes his arm—WAKE UP I NEED YOU, WAKE UP I NEED YOU PETER—
Behind her, her brother stirs but he’s too tired—he doesn’t know she’s in danger, and Cassie has to fend for herself. “Cassie,” Mommy, says and her hand comes toward her like a twisted claw. “That’s for Peter, you can’t—”
Cassie screeches again, “STOP! STOP!” She bares her teeth at her mommy who is looking less like her Mommy and like Daria, Daria folded her arms like that and Cassie hated her. A hand closing the door. Locking the door. Leaving her, leaving her, leaving her, and taking Peter away.
Mommy turns to look at her—her eyes look weird.
“I WON’T LET YOU!” she screams, and her tummy feels really bad, like Renee is standing outside the door, like she’s pointing a gun at her. Peter “NO—NO—PETER! PETER!” Her brother stirs again beside her but doesn’t get up, and she grips his hand tight.
“Cassie—”
Cassie screams at the top of her lungs—that gets them to stop, that’s scared them away—and she can feel the sweat rolling down her armpits and coming down her back and everything feels hot, like fever hot—and she screams again, as loud as she can—BE BRAVE, CASSIE—BE BRAVE—
“Honey, it’s just me, just let me—”
The hand reaches out to her again, and Cassie is wracked with a terror that makes her knees tremble and her head ache, and she thinks suddenly, I’m going to die—
—and with all her might, she grabs the arm and sinks her teeth into its hand.
A yelp—like someone in pain, and there are hands pushing at her, so Cassie bites down harder, harder, harder HURT THEM BEFORE THEY HURT YOU, HURT THEM BEFORE THEY HURT YOU— and hands shove at her, squeeze at her, push and pull and grab at her face, but she doesn’t want to die, she doesn’t want to—
—die, and she hears it loud, the sound of a fist meeting skin, as she hides under the bed. There’s a man in their room, and boots on the floor near the bed and the man is screaming at Peter—and rears back his leg, and kicks his boot into the center of his chest, and Peter makes an ugly sound. Cassie backs up and up and up until her back is flat against the wall, and she’s crying so hard that everything looks blurry.
Peter’s face is all swollen and bloodied, and he doesn’t look at all like her brother anymore. He crawls towards the man, and the man moves his leg again and kicks him backwards, for a second her brother is on his back and breathing weird and the man drags him up again by the collar. Cassie closes her eyes tight because she doesn’t want to see, hugging her knees. And when she open her eyes again, Peter is laying on the floor again and his face is all messed up and for a second he’s looking at her, really looking at her—cracks of Peter’s brown eyes through his beat-up face, and his lip is really big and his nose is bleeding red all over and Peter is making noises Cassie’s never heard him make before—
That man’s fist crashes into the side of Peter’s head, and then right into his mouth, and something scatters across the floor and comes to a stop right in front of her. It’s a tooth.
A strange sense of horror grows wide in Cassie’s stomach. Peter said that only happens to kids. Peter’s not… Peter’s not a kid. So why… Why is his tooth…
When he says her name, blood bubbles out between his lips and spreads on the ground, and for a second they’re staring at each other, Peter and the new gap in his mouth, a gap in his mouth just like hers, and his eyes are shiny and a hand grasps into Peter’s jumpsuit and drags him up by the collar, and for a while then all Cassie can see are the way Peter’s legs dangle and not his face anymore, just his feet and the hem of his jumpsuit, and the way he sway with each new hit, jerk and tense every time that sound comes again, like skin hitting skin.
Her brother’s body drops to the floor, and she watches him tense and then relax against the concrete, from his mouth bubbles of blood and foam. It isn’t Peter’s face anymore but a bloody mass of pinkish swelling with two cracks for eyes, a half-open mouth. Her brother sucks in a short breath and then crows out a pained whine. He coughs. He coughs again, weaker. His hands curl against their cement floor and relax. His breathing is all strange—quick in and quick out, stopping and starting and stopping again—a gurgling in his throat, and when he coughs again red comes out.
The man is still there but he’s just standing there; Cassie can see his boots in her tearful vision, and he’s making weird sounds, and then he kneels beside her brother, and she can see more of him now—his jeans, the hem of his sweatshirt, and the way he grabs Peter by the hair and pulls up so that her brother’s face is bared to the light above. He whispers something at Peter, forces his face closer, and then whispers something else, and Peter makes that weird gurgly sound again, and another dribble of blood drags down his chin.
The brown-haired man is bent so low now that Cassie can see his mouth open—his white teeth, his slight smile—and he whispers something else that Cassie can’t hear before crouching down further. He tilts his head, and tilts it further, and now Cassie can see the man’s face entirely: his brown eyes zero in on hers.
Mr. Beck.
She stares back, so afraid that her legs are numb and trembling, so afraid that she’s frozen against the wall under their bed, so afraid that a rush of new tears comes down her face. There’ are dots of blood in the man’s brown beard and speckled across his face, and when he wipes his face with his sleeve, smearing it a little. His right hand hangs at his side, and his knuckles and fingers are all red and swollen like Peter’s face; they match. The sound of the punches echo in Cassie’s mind—boned knuckle slamming into skin—over and over and over. Blood, blood, blood, and behind the man Peter’s still laying on the floor unmoving.
The man stands up and wipes his hands on his pants, and he makes a pained sound as he does, clutching his swollen hand, and says, “Ah, shit,” before cradling the hand in his other one. Then he steps over Peter’s motionless body, shoves open the door, and the door closes behind with a click.
The lock turns, and she and Peter are alone again—safe.
Peter’s dying, she thinks. He’s really, really dying. This is what it sounds like when people die, Frank made that gurgling sound, that coughing sound while he died. Now Peter is, too. And his dead body will lay in this room cold and still and he’s gonna die and he’ll be gone and then she’ll be all alone—
—and her mouth tastes salty like skin and her heart is thumping so loud she can’t hear anything else. In front of her, her blonde-haired mother stares at her horrified, like she’s a monster who’s crawled out from under the bed.
She did something bad, she did, but Peter would be proud of her if he was awake now. She’s a grown-up now. Who else is there to protect her when Peter can’t? She can only rely on herself, and, well, Cassie knows she’s not a good kid anymore. She stabbed Zhiyuan. She helped Peter strangle Mason. She held a gun and pointed it at Haroun. She’s even watched Mr. Beck hurt Peter and didn’t do anything to help him. She’s not the kid who she was before. She’s scarier now. Better. Safer.
Her mommy looks strange—her eyes a little bigger, her mouth slightly parted as she grasps her now-bleeding hand.
Cassie peels her lips away from her teeth and, with a heart-thumping, dizzying breath, bares her teeth.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 — 7:03 PM
Maggie stares down at her hand—the teeth marks are starting to bleed a little, not enough to drip, but just enough to fill each tooth-shaped mark with red.
“She bit me,” she says, as the shock comes to her. “She…”
Cassie had certainly scratched her and tried to hit her with her fists, but that was kids. Those were tantrums. She hadn’t bitten her—well, not since she was a toddler. That’s not her daughter—whoever her daughter was before. This is some feral child, some mixture of the worst parts of Scott and the worst parts of her and all those pieces of Charlie Keene and Peter Parker that Maggie doesn’t recognize.
She’s sitting in one of the Medbay rooms now, an examination room, squeezing her hand, and a nurse practitioner is taking a look at her hand, currently cleaning it with a cloth doused in a liquid chemical. “Do you know when your last tetanus shot was, Mrs. Paxton?”
These kids are violent—that place tainted them, not only traumatized them but turned them into something they didn’t used to be. Peter who attacked people who got too close. Cassie had stabbed people. Rumor had it that Steve Rogers was the one who had given Stark that broken nose.
“Mrs. Paxton?”
“Oh,” she says. “Sorry. Um, it’s been a while, I think.”
The nurse goes to the computer near the counter, types for a minute, and then he says, “2009 sound right?”
2009. Nine years ago, just before Cassie was born. Right after she met Scott, which she tries not to think about as soon as the memory bubbles up. “Probably," she says.
The nurse practitioner nods, and he slathers the wound in some kind of antibacterial ointment before wrapping it up in white bandaging. “You’ll have to keep watch for infection,” he says. “Pretty common for bites, around ten percent. You’ll want to come in tomorrow, just so we can check.”
She nods.
“Good news is there isn’t any serious damage—but I’m prescribing you an antibiotic, at least for the next week. Make sure you watch for infection, otherwise—”
A woman’s voice from down the hall: “Maggie!” It sounds like Cassie’s psychiatrist, Alexis, so she hops down from the exam table and hurries out into the hallway where the woman in pink scrubs is beckoning her. “Come on, it’s Peter, he…”
She hurries down the hallway with Alexis in tow, and both of them stop in the doorway.
Peter is sitting up.
Her daughter is gripping one of Peter’s dinner cans and pushing it firmly into his hands, crouched at his feet and talking to him. She can’t see the boy’s face from this angle, but she sees a nod, and she can see his hands, and Maggie watches his fingers close around the open can as Cassie lets it go. With his other hand, he dips his fingers inside and scoops out a handful of green beans and stares at it for a second—Cassie bends in close and whispers to him, and the teen nods again. He tilts his head back and forces the beans into his mouth, chews, and then reaches in for the next handful. He eats surprisingly quickly once he starts, getting through both of the cans Cassie took from Stark, and then lies down again with his back to the door.
Cassie didn’t want the can for herself.
She wanted it for Peter.
Is this what they did in there?
Her little girl had to coax the traumatized teenage boy into eating? Because he was so far gone, so utterly broken—she had to encourage him just to eat? Maybe that’s why they could only feed him through the tube at first; because he was used to Cassie encouraging him to eat. He never would’ve even needed the tube, maybe, if Cassie had been there with him.
Maggie watches as Cassie reaches over Peter and a blanket up to the boy’s shoulders. She pats his head a couple times and then lays down beside him, cradling her toy zebra to her chest and shutting her eyes.
She knows that Jim thinks Peter’s a bad influence on Cassie—that he hurt her in some way.
But God, they’re so gentle with each other. So caring, so careful. Maybe the only sense of gentleness they had in that place. Without Peter, who knows what Cassie would’ve been like once they’d escaped? Who knows if she would’ve escaped at all? But without Cassie, maybe Peter would’ve starved himself to death. Maybe he would’ve become someone who they could never get back. Everyone knew that Peter saved Cassie’s life countless times over—his body was a memorial to everything he’d done for her. Really, Maggie had never thought much about how Cassie had saved Peter.
When Maggie looks over at her daughter, her Cassie is looking at her, but not at her face—at the bandages now wrapped around her right hand.
Cassie looks back up at her, her violent terror of a daughter, and for a moment her brow furrows—and she looks seven years old again.