The plan
“So,” Mr Harrington said. “Your task is to create a robot. This year’s theme is ‘a changing feature’. You will be marked on your concept and execution, and this project may be extra credit for your end of year mark. You have half and hour of planning, and then you may begin.”
Peter scrunched his eyes. A changing future? What could he- ohhhhhhh. He had an idea. It was going to be hard though. Really hard. Luckily, he’d been working on this idea in one of Tony’s labs. It was cheating, necessarily…
“I know that look!” Tony said, pointing his finger at Peter, almost accusingly.
“Relax,” Peter said. “I won’t blow up the school.”
Tony narrowed his eyes at Peter. “I never said you would blow up the school, which just makes me think that you were thinking you would blow up the school, and now I’m even more worried than I was before. And a tad confused.”
“Come on,” Peter reasoned. “How many times have I blown up your lab?”
Wait. Peter hadn’t thought that through before he said that.
The look Tony sent Peter was enough to confirm what he thought.
“I promise I won’t blow anything up!”
“Well, Clint might if he doesn’t step away from that thing,” Steve said, who was glaring at Clint who held up a welder in front of him and was grinning slightly evilly at it.
Peter grabbed a piece of paper and started drawing up plans.
“Is it bad that I have no idea what that is?” Clint said from over Peter’s shoulder.
“Yes,” Tony said. “It is very bad that you don’t understand what my eighteen-year-old kid is drawing.”
“To be fair,” Bruce intervened. “He is designing a very complicated robot and- oohhh, I get it, you were being sarcastic,” Bruce backtracked at Tony’s dry eye-roll.
“Yes, I was being sarcastic! There is no way Clint could know what he’s drawing. It’s like, university-level engineering, and, what did you study in university, again, Clint? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t go! You trained as a circus act!”
“You swore never to mention that,” Clint hissed through his teeth.
“You did? I think it was awesome,” Wade said seriously. “You got on the team because you-” Wade cracked, and couldn’t hold his laughter in, façade breaking.
He doubled over laughing, and Clint jabbed his elbow onto Wade’s spine, and Wade collapsed on the floor, still laughing.
“You- oh god- learnt how to use a bow and arrow- aha – in a circus!”
Wade continued to roll on the floor, laughing his head off. It was mildly disturbing, mainly because Peter wasn’t sure if he had taken a breath in the last minute. He was probably the only person who was worried about that. Others were probably more concerned about the fact that there was a trained mercenary in their midst. Meh. Both were valid reasons to be concerned. Peter just didn’t worry over the latter.
Clint glared at Tony. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said, gesturing to where Deadpool was rolling on the floor of a school hall. “He’ll never let this down.”
Tony shrugged. “Worth it. You should have gone to university.”
“Circumstances, Stark! Circumstances.”
“I’d hate to interrupt this… lovely conversation,” Nat said, “But you’re all drawing a bit of attention to yourselves.”
Wade stopped laughing and sat up, clutching his back, his legs spread wide like a child
“Goddammit, Clint, I think you dislocated one of my discs.”
Clint flipped his middle finger up at Wade.
“That was pathetic, Birdbrain,” Tony said, flipping his glasses over his eyes.
Wade gasped. “A pathetic Birdy by Birdy. I didn’t even know that was possible.” Wade turned to Peter. “Did you know that was possible?”
Peter smiled at Wade’s antics, but turned away from his boyfriend in favour of continuing his project. He looked up to the clock, to see that twenty minutes had passed. That was ok. He could do it.
Peter dragged Bruce away from the group to the middle of the hall where the larger pieces of machinery were kept, as well as large sheets of metal.
“Why are you bringing me?” Bruce asked. “Wouldn’t Tony be better, cause he’s, like, an engineer and all that?”
“Maybe, but this bit has more to do with physics than anything else.”
“I saw your designs,” Bruce noted. “They seem really good. Too good to be thought of in twenty minutes.”
“I may be working on this in one of Tony’s labs,” Peter said.
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“I mean, I guess, but I’ve never actually designed a prototype, or gone over the science. It’s just a concept I’ve been thinking of.”
“Ah, cool. So, what is your concept?”
“Well, I’m thinking of making a robot bird, that will hopefully be able to fly, depends how much aluminium sheets there are, and the concept is how in the future, a lot of fauna will be extinct and how it will only exist in robots, but-” Peter cut himself off, the base of his skull throbbing with his Spidey-Sense.
Bruce raised an eyebrow in question. Peter held up a finger cocking his head to the side, listening to anything that may be of danger.
Words swam around him, sounds of people talking, laughing, the sound of metal against metal. The flares of sound from people welding metal to metal. The sound of keys on computers. Sounds, of a happy atmosphere, apart from in one corner of the room.
It was only because Peter was listening for it, that he managed to hear the words over the din.
“Fucking faggots.”
Peter whirled, to see Mr Thompson mutter this to his son behind Tony, Steve and Bucky.
What made Peter rush back to the table with such speed wasn’t the words themselves; Tony, Steve and Bucky handled words like this frequently, though, admittedly, not at such close distance, not basically to their faces.
No, what made Peter run over there was Wade’s reaction.
It was no more than a whisper, a calm, controlled set of mundane words said with a smile that Peter could see sent goose-bumps onto Mr Thompson's flesh. And, he could see, some of the Avengers.
“I’m sorry, I missed that. What did you say?”