Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Tesseract has awakened.

It is on a little world. A human world.

They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will.

He is ready to lead.

And our force-- our Chitauri-- will follow.

A world will be his. The universe yours.

And the humans, what can they do but burn?

***

“Okay, here’s how it’s gonna go.”

“Is this going to be different than the last time you told me how it was going to go?” Ned asked, laying down flat on his back on the couch while Peter paced in front of the television. “Or can we skip ahead to the part where I tell you you’re overthinking this?”

Peter paused his pacing to look down and scowl at him.

“This is how it’s gonna go,” he repeated a bit more insistently.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Ned waved his hands up in the air as a sign for him to continue.

“So you know that movie theater over by the fancy once-a-year Thai place?” Peter asked.

“Yeah.”

“They’re having a mini Agnes Varda film festival next week,” he continued, sweating under his arms more than was normal just discussing this plan and hoping that wasn’t a bad sign for what it would be like to enact said plan. “And you know how much she likes Agnes Varda--”

“She’s a film major, of course she loves Agnes Varda.”

“So I’m gonna buy tickets for us to go,” Peter ignored the snark. “Because movies are romantic as shit, especially when you’re trying to convince a literal filmmaker that you’re worth dating, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“And I know what you’re thinking,” Peter switched his voice to a painfully inaccurate imitation of Ned. “Peter, you and MJ do stuff on your own all the time-- how’s she’s supposed to know it’s a date--”

“What kind of muppet voice--”

“Well, thank you so much for asking,” Peter cut him off and began ticking off items on his fingers. “I’m going to wear a whole outfit of clean clothes; I’m gonna pick her up from her apartment and walk her to the theater; I’m gonna buy her whatever concessions she wants-- to a limit, because I’m romantic but also very poor; I’m gonna hold her hand during the movie; I’m gonna walk her to her door at the end of the night--”

“Did you get this off of a listicle?” Ned asked as he sat up. “It sounds kinda like you got it off a listicle. Buzzfeed or something, but from 1953.”

“Ned,” Peter whined, slumping down to sit on the coffee table so he was closer to eye-level with his friend.

“Okay, alright,” Ned sat all the way up. “Dude. Peter. This all sounds great, but you have got to chill out.”

Peter sighed and dropped his elbows to his knees, let his face fall into his hands where he mumbled a barely comprehensible, “I know.”

“It’s just MJ!” Ned laughed. “You know how to talk to MJ.”

Peter lifted his face and shot him a look as if to say do I, though? and Ned just shrugged.

“Most of the time you know how to talk to MJ,” he corrected himself.

Face back in his hands, Peter groaned as Ned laughed brightly and shoved at his shoulder gently.

“The movie thing is a good idea!” he assured. “Just don’t be too much of a weirdo-- Y’know, she likes weird, but don’t be the creepy kind of weird?”

“I’m gonna drop you in the Hudson,” Peter said flatly.

“You’ve got this, Spidey,” Ned ignored the comment.

“Right,” Peter nodded to himself, kept nodding, got a little bit stuck with the nodding. “I got this, I totally got this. Just gotta be myself!” he lifted his hands in an awkward sort of shrug.

Ned made a face. “Well…”

“The Hudson, Ned!”

***

He went into Midtown as Peter Parker to buy two movie tickets, tucked them away safely in his backpack, and then swung away from Midtown as Spider-Man.

The knowledge that he had feelings that were maybe a bit more than friendship-centric about Michelle Jones wasn’t new to him, but that was part of the problem. Peter had gotten so accustomed to pining after her from a distance, that he had gotten comfortable in that spot, and the idea of risking it by bringing his relationship-incompetence into the picture was terrifying.

But he was going to do it, and he was going to do right by her, and it was going to be fine.

Fine? Fine. Probably. Right?

“MJ! Hi, how are you--” he paced, walking the narrow lip of the roof he’d claimed that afternoon as he talked to himself. “Great-- I’m glad and-- I’m also--” he sighed. “A big fat idiot.”

Peter bent his knees, tossed his body up into the air in a back flip, and landed heel-to-toe where he’d been standing once more.

“MJ, you look lovely this evening-- May I take your coat?” he tried again. “No-- You don’t-- You’re gonna walk, don’t take her coat on the way out of the apartment-- Idiot. Idiot, idiot.”

He pivoted, started walking back the other direction, arms out for balance even though he didn’t need them to be.

“Hi, MJ, it’s me Peter,” he continued glibly. “Do you find me completely unbearable or would you maybe wanna kiss sometime?”

“I think that’s the one.”

Peter’s head whipped around, and if he hadn’t been him he very well might have toppled over the edge with the force and momentum of it, but instead he just slumped his shoulders and hopped off the ledge.

“Jesus, Nat,” he clutched at his chest faux-dramatically. “Sometimes I think you’re trying to, like, hit a record for the number of heart attacks induced by one person.”

“Maybe I am,” she shrugged before crossing her arms and leaning her shoulder against the door that led into the building below them.

“So, what’s up?” he pulled his mask off and ruffled out his hair. “I want this to be a social visit, but that has not historically been the case and you always end up saying something that makes me never wanna talk to you again.”

“Something big is going on and we’re bringing Spider-Man in for a debrief.”

“Yeah!” Peter pointed at her. “Like that-- exactly!”

“I’ve got something for you,” she ignored his sarcasm and pushed off the door, stepping up closer to him.

“Like friendship bracelets?” Peter grinned at her. “Are they spider themed? Y’know what, doesn’t matter-- I know this girl in my biochem class that has a great Etsy shop for spooky charms and I can totally get us a discount--”

“Director Fury wants you to look at this,” Natasha pulled a flash drive out of her pocket and held it up to Peter, who immediately took a step back.

“I don’t work for Shield,” he shook his head.

“This is a bit bigger than Shield,” she told him evenly. “We’re bringing in some extra eyes.”

“And you need my eyes?” he grimaced. “Like, specifically?”

“Parker, you don’t get to run around spouting about responsibility and then duck out on this.”

“I’m a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!” he fought back. “If this doesn’t involve my neighborhood, then I’m sorry--”

“This could potentially involve every neighborhood,” Natasha said, voice coming as close to exasperated as it ever did. “I mean every neighborhood.”

“I’ve got stuff going on,” Peter was very nearly whining but she had seen him at worse moments at this point so he didn’t particularly care. “Good stuff! For once in my fucking life.”

“And that doesn’t have to change,” another step closer to him, flash drive outstretched. “Just take a look--”

“Nope-- No-- Absolutely not,” Peter waved his hands and shook his head and laughed nervously.

“Spidey--”

“No, listen,” he cut her off. “The last time I got involved with you guys, I had to go undercover working for an arms dealer, build a bunch of weapons of mass destruction that I did not want to build, and basically play a game for which I did not have all the rules! So, no, Natasha. Not happening.”

“We’re bringing you in so we can give you all the rules,” she took a step forward, but Peter took a step back, now fully up on the ledge of the roof as he put his mask back on. Natasha saw what he was doing and lifted a hand. “Don’t you dare--”

“So, sorry--”

“Peter--”

“Spidey sense is going off--”

“You are the absolute bane of my--”

“Gotta jet!”

And with that he hopped backwards off the roof and swung away faster than she could have chased him.

***

“Coulson, he’s not budging,” she said, phone in hand as she slipped into the front seat of a nondescript car.

“That’s fine, focus on the big guy,” he replied on the other end.

Natasha snorted. “You know Stark trusts me about as far as he can throw me. Without the suit,” she said. “And he’s our best chance at getting the kid on board.”

“Yeah, I know,” Coulson said, smile in his voice. “I’ve got the tech boys. You get the other big guy.”

Natasha blanched.

“Ебать.”

***

Tony Stark was no longer dying.

Thanks to his dead father and a tenaciously observant NYU film major from Queens, he had a working arc reactor in his chest and a brand new lease on life.

“Good to go on this end,” he said, after he had breached the water and was zipping back through the sky towards the Tower-- the place that had been becoming more and more of a permanent residence despite his continued love for Malibu, for no reason other than convenience. “The rest is up to you.”

“You disconnected the transmission lines?” Pepper asked in his ear, because somehow, nearly a year later, she was still putting up with him. “Are we officially off the grid?”

“Stark Tower is about to become a beacon of self-sustaining clean energy,” Tony said. “The kid’s gonna get this, right?”

“He said he would, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, but he’s not always entirely reliable,” Tony deadpanned. “What with the lack of time management skills and all.”

“Oh, come on,” Pepper laughed. “When has he ever let you down, huh?”

“Many, many times,” he responded, unable to keep himself from smiling softly at the sound of her joy, even filtering through the speakers of his helmet.

“Well, assuming the arc reactor takes over and this actually works,” she continued. “I’m sure he’ll get it for you just like you asked.”

“Assuming it works,” Tony scoffed as he rounded a building and could finally see his destination towering before him. “Come on, go ahead and light her up.”

“Okay, here we go,” she said, as it began to do just that, shining one floor at a time from the bottom up until right there at the top, STARK stood tall in blue-white lettering. “How does it look?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Tony said, a warm sense of pride growing in his chest. “The kid really better be getting a good shot of this.”

“If he does we can use it on the public awareness campaign,” Pepper’s voice was getting excited in that way it did when she was making plans-- specifically plans for something she cared deeply about. “You need to do some press for this, it’s going to be a major deal.”

“You think?” he teased. “I can’t wait to take it to the DC guys tomorrow,” she continued, unbothered. “I’m starting zoning on the next three buildings that are gonna do this.”

“This kind of talk really doesn’t kill the moment for you, huh?” he laughed, coming up on the Tower itself and landing gracefully on the launch pad outside the penthouse.

“Not really,” she said, but he could hear her smirking.

“But the moment, Pep,” he groused as he stepped out of his suit and strode towards the door. “Live in the moment.”

“Get in here and I will.”

Tony turned the corner to find her, just as Jarvis told him:

“Sir, Agent Coulson of Shield is on the line.”

“I’m not in.”

“I’m afraid he’s insisting,” Jarvis insisted, as much as he could insist as a disembodied voice.

“Grow a spine, Jay,” Tony grinned at Pepper as she stood from the couch and set down her tablet, smiling right back at him all the while. “I’ve got a date.”

“Levels are holding steady, I think,” she walked towards him, motioning to the hologram of the Tower that was up on one of the nearby desks.

“Of course they are,” he met her halfway and looked up at the readings, casually wrapping an arm around her waist as he did because he was allowed to do that now. “I’m directly involved.”

The blue light reflected off her skin, her hair, in such a way that made her look otherworldly-- completely and utterly beautiful from here all the way to the other side of the galaxy, and he kissed her temple to stave off the bubble of feeling it caused in his chest. Right next to the hunk of metal.

“So,” he spoke up. “How does it feel to be a genius?”

“Me?” she chuckled, turning her face to look him in the eye. “Are you offering me a compliment, Mister Stark?”

“What do you mean? Of course I am,” he responded, glint in his eye. “All of this came from you.”

“No,” she turned to face him, hip leaning up against the desk. “All of this came from that,” she tapped gently on the reactor in his chest with one finger.

Almost dying and falling in love were two things that could pretty reliably make a guy feel like a new man, but Tony was pretty sure neither of them were anything compared with being smiled at by Pepper Potts like that.

“You can still give yourself some credit,” he teased. “How does twelve percent sound?”

She quirked a brow at him. “Are we negotiating how much credit I’m owed here?” she asked. “And is twelve percent really your starting offer?”

“An argument could be made for fifteen,” he shrugged as she rolled her eyes and stepped away from him, back towards the couch on the other end of the space.

“Twelve percent-- You’re something else, Tony Stark,” she laughed and he followed her at a nonchalant pace, relishing in the banter of it.

“I did do all the heavy lifting,” he said. “You know, by lifting all the heavy things.”

Pepper rolled her eyes as she kneeled down by the coffee table, pulling a very nice bottle of champagne out of its ice bucket.

“Yes, you did,” she said mockingly. “Big, strong man that you are.”

“Exactly, yeah,” Tony crouched down facing her, watching as she unwrapped the foil from the top of the bottle, readied the cork for popping. “Thank you so much for understanding that.”

Pepper popped the cork, loud and punctuating as she shot him an exasperated, but still amused, look.

Tony just took her in for a moment, as she began to pour two glasses, coping with the inconsolable urge to buy her things she didn’t need-- like three new cars. Or an island.

“I’m gonna pay for that comment about percentages, aren’t I?” he asked. “In some subtle way that I won’t be able to predict?”

Pepper handed him a glass and lifted her own to clink against it.

“It’s not gonna be all that subtle,” she smirked.

“Sir,” Jarvis spoke up. “You have a visitor on the launch pad.”

Tony turned his head just as the sound of knocking on the glass door filled the room. He groaned as he pushed himself up off the ground and Pepper chuckled at him.

“Oh, I wonder who that could be,” he said flatly as he crossed the room. “At the top of my Tower, on the outside of the building.”

“Maybe it’s your conscience,” Pepper called out after him, still sitting there like a masterpiece, sipping her champagne in her denim shorts. “Coming back to haunt you over that twelve percent comment.”

“Oh, Pep,” Tony said over his shoulder as he reached the door, ignoring the wildly waving Spider-Man with a camera around his neck on the other side of the glass until he’d finished his quip. “You know I don’t have one of those.”

And then he opened the door, just a crack, but even still the whirlwind arrived.

“Tony! Hey-- That looked so cool,” Peter began immediately, already pushing past Tony into the penthouse without invitation. “You were back in time to see it right? The way the whole thing lit up-- and it’s self-sustainable?! Fucking dope as hell, dude-- Hi, Miss Potts!”

“Hi, Peter,” she smiled fondly at him.

“Tony, seriously, I gotta show you this,” Peter pulled off his mask and lifted his camera, beginning to thumb through the menu screen. “I got some great shots of it all lit up.”

“How about you email them to me,” Tony suggested, a hand on Peter’s shoulder to try and subtly push him back out the door.

“No, no, no,” Peter wasn’t swayed, and Tony really couldn’t tell if he was being intentionally obstinate or not because sometimes he was just like this for fun. Because apparently being a twenty-year-old superhero with direct access to Stark Tower whenever he felt like it wasn’t fun enough. “I’ve got it right here, it’ll only take a second… Ah-ha!”

Peter held out his camera, LCD screen pointed at Tony for a fraction of a second before he turned it back to look at it himself, frowned, and muttered, “Wait, no…”

“Underoos…” Tony sighed.

“Sorry, I’m borrowing MJ’s camera and the menus are all different… Here we go!” he beamed and showed Tony the screen again, but Tony just leveled the kid with a flat expression. “What?” Peter frowned.

“I’d love to see your pictures, Peter,” Pepper caught his attention from the other side of the room, and immediately Tony was watching him vault over the couch to land in a crouch beside her and show her the camera. “Oh, these are wonderful,” she gushed as she took the offered camera and began to scroll through.

“Don’t encourage this,” Tony pleaded as he trudged over to them.

“Not many people getting that angle,” Peter grinned as he pointed at one photo in particular, ignoring Tony and making Pepper laugh.

“Annie Liebowitz, I swear to--”

“Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt,” Jarvis chimed in. “But Agent Coulson is calling again.”

“Yeah, that’s still a no.”

“I’m afraid my protocols are being overridden--”

“Not me,” Peter put up his hands defensively.

And all of it happened in quick enough succession that Tony didn’t have a chance to do anything about it before Phil Coulson himself was talking out of Tony’s phone on the coffee table.

“Mister Stark, we need to talk.”

Tony snatched the phone up with a heavy sigh before replying with a snarky, “You have reached the life model decoy of Tony Stark, please leave a message.”

“This is urgent.”

Tony hung up and stuffed the phone in his pocket.

“They’re bothering you too?” Peter asked, grabbing the bottle of champagne off the table and taking a swig straight out of it like the germy little goblin he was.

“You want a glass for that?” Tony asked flatly. “Oh, underage boy in my home?”

“I had a run-in with Nat just this morning,” Peter continued on his own tangent, not letting Tony derail him. “You know, she is so cool and I wanna be her friend so bad-- but all she wants me for is my wacky DNA and my-- big, smart brain.”

“I’m sure the brain has very little to do with it,” Tony took the bottle out of his hands and wiped the lip of it off with his sleeve before setting it aside.

“Sir, I’m deeply sorry,” Jarvis spoke up again. “But my protocols are being tampered with and I cannot stop the elevator--”

Tony noticed the quick instinct with which Peter slipped his mask back on and stood up, just in time for the elevator doors to slide open and reveal Agent Coulson, unamused and carrying a thick, leather file folder in one hand.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me with the security breaches,” Tony deadpanned, just as Pepper stood up, seemingly unbothered by the whole situation.

“Phil, come on in,” she offered with a nod of her head.

“Miss Potts,” he nodded politely in return as he stepped into the penthouse.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony could see Peter slowly backing up and wondered, not for the first time, just how messed up the kid was by his stint as a superspy. He knew Peter hadn’t exactly enjoyed it, and Tony knew him well enough at this point to understand his aversion to firearms, but maybe it was the trust thing that they’d fucked around with the most. Maybe that’s why he looked about ready to sprint in the opposite direction just at the sight of a Shield agent.

“Mister Stark-- and Spider-Man,” Coulson continued. “It’s good that you’re both here for this.”

“Nope,” Peter shook his head with a nervous laugh. “Not actually here. Just on my way out actually--”

“It’ll only take a minute,” Coulson said in about as inviting and gentle a voice as Tony ever heard from the man.

“Sorry! Places to be, things to do,” Peter rambled as he approached the door to the balcony-- closer than the door to the launch pad that he had originally come through. “You understand. Life of a superhero and all that-- the city never sleeps!”

And with that he was out the door and over the railing without so much as a goodbye, leaving Tony to deal with whatever Shield nonsense was being brought to his doorstep this time on his own.

“Well,” Pepper brought them all back to the moment after having watched a guy just jump off the side of a building to avoid a conversation. “Phil, we’re celebrating-- Champagne?”

“No, thank you,” he lifted a hand politely. “I really can’t stay long.”

“Phil,” Tony tried the word out in his mouth and grimaced. “Phil. No, I don’t like it. Are you sure your first name isn’t Agent?”

Coulson gave him an amused look. “Pretty sure, Mister Stark,” he said, before holding out the folder in his hands. “We need you to look this over as soon as possible.”

“I don’t--”

“I’ll take that,” Pepper accepted the folder from Coulson’s grip, placed it in Tony’s hands instead, and took a sip of her champagne, all without making Tony explain that he had a stubborn mental block against being handed things.

“If you could also get Spider-Man’s eyes on this, that would be a great help,” Coulson requested easily.

“Why?” Tony furrowed his brow, almost surprised by his own sudden protective streak and doing everything in his power to properly ignore it.

“Agent Romanoff seems to think that he’s a helpful asset to your scientific process,” Coulson smiled, almost teasing, Tony would’ve thought, if he didn’t know better. “That he helps keep you on track.”

“The guy that just jumped out of a window? He keeps me on track?” Tony pointed over his shoulder with a disbelieving lift of his eyebrows. “You know what it’s like to work with that guy?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“I’ll tell you what it’s like,” Tony said. “It’s like having a stray dog around that keeps coming back because you fed it that one time.”

“Nevertheless,” Coulson seemed unperturbed by this statement, as though he trusted Romanoff more than him. Which was, quite frankly, unfathomable. “We’d like to see if he has any valuable input, so do what you can.”

“What is this about, exactly?” Pepper asked, in that way that sounded more curious than demanding, and also was particularly effective in getting people to tell her what she wanted to know.

“Good question, because, you know, consultation hours are actually between eight and eight-thirty every other Thursday,” Tony shrugged.

“This isn’t a consultation.”

“Is it about the Avengers?” and Pepper lost a little of her high-ground with this next part. “Which I know… nothing about.”

Tony pulled a tablet out of the folder’s sleeve and began to make his way back over to the holodesk, scoffing as he went. “Can’t be about the Avengers-- I didn’t qualify for the Avengers. Not to mention, I’m pretty sure it was scrapped?”

He rattled these facts off as if he wasn’t sure of them, as if he didn’t care all that much, when in reality he would never forget sitting down in front of Fury and having to read all about how he was volatile and self-obsessed and didn’t know how to play well with others. It had been something of a hit to his ego, if he was being entirely honest, especially when he thought he had been getting better at some of those things.

Tony was self-aware enough to know all about his own flaws, but he let a kid superhero hang out in his lab out of the goodness of his heart, so could they really site volatile anymore?

“This isn’t about personality profiles anymore,” Coulson explained seriously as Tony tapped at the tablet a few times before swiping up and letting the holodesk take over. “As you can see.”

As he could see, alright.

Video files and Shield files and reports and write ups and photos popped up all at once as Pepper appeared at his shoulder, gaping at the flood of information stood in a semicircle around them just the same as Tony already was.

“That’s…”

“Yeah,” Tony exhaled.

“I’m taking the jet to DC tonight,” Pepper told him quietly but certainly.

“You don’t leave ‘til tomorrow?” he frowned at her.

“Tonight,” she shook her head. “You have a lot of homework.”

“Maybe I don’t,” he fought back, although not with his full chest, not with the way every time he looked up his father’s pet project was staring back at him. “Maybe I give it to the kid, huh? You know, he told me sometimes he takes cash to do lab reports for his classmates-- this isn’t all that different from that.”

“He does what?” Pepper questioned.

“Yeah, I’m realizing I maybe should’ve been less encouraging of that,” Tony brushed her off. “It was just the first instance of business awareness I’d ever seen him have.”

“You have to do your homework yourself,” she leveled him with a look, and Tony just sighed.

“Yeah,” he took her hand in his. “Fly safe.”

She kissed him on the cheek and then once on the lips, pulling away with a small smile.

“Work hard,” she told him, before leading Coulson back into the elevator and leaving him alone to the infodump of a lifetime.

Time to go to work.

***

The following morning, Peter Parker knew it was time to enact step one of his plan.

He had been preparing for this and he was ready and he just had to do it before Ned made good on his continuing threats to change the locks on the windows if Peter didn’t stop going on about it already.

“Okay, Parker,” he murmured to himself as he skipped up the steps to the front door of Michelle’s apartment building. “Polite. Charming. Not creepy. You got this.”

He bounced on the balls of his feet a couple of times, breathing deep so as to not accidentally squeeze the two cups in his hands too hard (one coffee with milk, one earl grey tea black), and then he pressed down the buzzer for her apartment with his elbow.

“I’m on my way out, whoever you are.”

“It’s me-- Pete-- Peter,” he replied to her hurried statement. “Parker,” he winced, even as he heard her snort out a laugh.

“What are you-- Nevermind,” she said. “I’ll be down in, like, ninety seconds.”

Now, contrary to popular belief and his general and expected tardiness, Peter actually had a pretty good internal clock, so he knew that Michelle was almost exactly right in her estimate of how long it would take her to get downstairs and be standing directly in front of him.

“Hey,” she gave him a quizzical smile. “Good morning?”

“Good morning,” he replied, a touch past too eager. “I-- Uh-- Here.”

He thrust out the cup of tea in his hand and held it in front of her, watching as a delighted little smile played at the corners of her mouth.

“Thanks,” she accepted the cup and took a sip with a contented hum.

“You have class now, right?” Peter asked.

“Yeah,” she made a face. “I oughta really get going if I don’t wanna miss my bus.”

“I can walk with you?” he suggested, and to his faint surprise, she barely even considered it before she said, “Okay.”

Soon enough, it became easy again, walking with her and talking with her without all the extra nerves he’d been building up for himself. Michelle told him about the class on documentary filmmaking that she was taking, recommended him one about modern textiles that had reminded her of when he was sixteen and still trying to make the absolute most efficient web fluid he could.

(He jotted the name of it down in the notes app on his phone. He was definitely going to watch it.)

She made him laugh and he made her roll her eyes and it felt like it always did when it was just the two of them-- good. Really, unbelievably good.

It had only been fifteen minutes, however, when his phone rang. And then when he ignored it, rang a second time, seemingly louder somehow.

“Sounds like maybe you should get that,” Michelle nodded towards his hand in his pocket where he gripped his vibrating cell phone, willing it to shut up.

He was having a good day, was he not allowed to have a good day? A good day with Michelle without any interruptions? A good day where he could ask her out and drop her off at class and just-- be?

But the phone kept ringing, and so Peter let out a breath and reluctantly agreed.

“I was going to stop and buy a paper anyway,” she motioned to the newsstand just up ahead that Peter knew she did often frequent. He was pretty sure it had more to do with the couple that owned it-- two women named Nora and Jin who loved to debate the day’s headlines with the likes of a young woman like Michelle-- than it did with the paper itself, but he took out his phone and nodded.

Peter waited until she was properly out of earshot, braced himself at the sight of Tony’s name lighting up the screen of his phone, and then took the plunge.

“You know I don’t work for you anymore, right?” he said upon answering. “Like, I’m not at your beck-and-call anymore?”

“You don’t?” Tony questioned glibly. “Huh. Seems like a weird decision for a kid who might want a recommendation letter from me one day.”

“Do you need something?” Peter pressed past what was an old argument at this point.

“You’re being very short with me this morning,” Tony observed with relative lightness, almost amusement. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Tony.”

“Am I interrupting something with Michelle?” he teased, bordering on giddy now.

“Tony,” Peter pinched the bridge of his nose as his ears went hot, glancing over at where Michelle was chatting with Nora to make sure she wasn’t paying attention to him.

“I need you to come in,” Tony cut to the chase. Finally.

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I can’t, though,” Peter insisted.

“Pete,” and there was that tone of voice that instilled some deep seated sense of duty. Fuck that tone of voice. “I need Spider-Man.”

Peter sighed. “You’re sure?”

“Wouldn’t be pulling you away from your girlfriend if I wasn’t.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Peter mumbled under his breath, because she wasn’t, if only because every time he got up the nerve to talk to her about it someone, somewhere needed the goddamn Spider-Man.

Michelle finished her purchase and her conversation then and he could see in her eyes as she walked back towards him that she knew he had to leave. A part of his heart leapt at the fact that it looked a lot like disappointment, but that just got overshadowed by guilt in the long run.

“Twenty minutes,” Tony said in his ear and Peter sighed.

“Yeah, twenty minutes,” he said before hanging up.

“Does the city need you?” she smiled, if a little sadly, and Peter’s lips pursed sheepishly in return.

“Unfortunately,” he grumbled, but Michelle just rolled her eyes.

What she did next was something that would continue to play on repeat in Peter’s head for days if not weeks or months. She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently as she leaned forward to press a kiss to his cheek.

“Go get ‘em, Tiger,” she grinned at his gobsmacked face as she pulled away and returned to her journey towards class. “And call me later!”

It took him a beat of processing his own awe, before he could wrap his tongue around any words again, so when he called out, “Will do, Jones!” it was awkwardly late.

She turned over her shoulder and smiled at him anyway.

Peter Parker was smitten.

***

“This better be good,” Peter said the minute Jarvis let him in through the window of Tony’s lab, tugging off his mask and striding across the room.

He was in a weird mood already, that much Tony could see by the clashing body language of frowning at Tony while carrying on with a bit of a skip in his step. Well, that was fine, they were only about to make the weird mood weirder.

“Come with me,” Tony replied without preempt, grabbing his tablet from a nearby workbench and moving towards the elevator without waiting for Peter’s response.

“What?” the kid chased after him. “I thought you needed help with something.”

“Yeah. Bit of a field trip though,” he said as they stepped through the doors that Jarvis had open and waiting for them. “Take us up, Jay.”

Peter just looked at him with plain confusion, clearly having a lot of questions but not having enough information to even know where to start. Good. That was the point.

“You might wanna put that back on,” Tony nodded at the mask in Peter’s fist as they got closer and closer to their destination.

“You gonna stop being cryptic soon?” Peter asked, but he put the mask on anyway, because if there was one thing the kid really did try not to be reckless about it was his identity. “Not a huge fan of Cryptic Tony.”

“Noted,” Tony snorted with amusement, but then the doors opened to the roof and they were hit with a blast of wind from the waiting helicopter. “Come on.”

“Tony…” Peter paused hesitantly.

“We gotta go,” he motioned to their mode of transportation.

There was a moment, staring down the Spider-Man mask instead of Peter’s easy-to-read face, when Tony thought he might actually bow out, not let Tony drag him into something without knowing what it was first. But the fact of the matter was, Peter Parker had an undying faith in people, even in Tony Stark, who was actively using that faith to manipulate him, so with a heave of his shoulders and a quiet this better be good, Peter got into the helicopter right alongside him.

It wasn’t until they were up in the air that Tony turned on his tablet and showed it to Peter.

“This is what we’re dealing with,” he said, as a picture of the glowing blue cube he’d been staring at all night appeared on the screen.

Peter studied it for a moment, genuinely curious, before something like realization filled the space.

“That’s a Shield file,” Peter said coolly.

“Yes, it is,” Tony replied, just as level, having had more time to prepare for this particular argument than his temporary adversary.

“I-- Are you fucking serious?” he snapped. “You know that I don’t want anything to do with this! I’ve been dodging them all week, I--”

“Kid, I’ve looked this over, I know what’s at stake,” Tony explained. “This isn’t something we get to dodge.”

“No, Tony! No!” Peter covered his eye lenses with the palms of his hands for a moment before he needed to drop them to really accentuate his point. “I don’t wanna know about it, okay? I’ve got a lot going for me right now-- I’m doing well in school, I’m getting better at managing money, May is doing really well, I’m gonna go on a date next week with the girl I really, really like, and I don’t have time for whatever--” he faltered, looking at the screen still pulled up on Tony’s tablet. “I don’t have time for… Is that an energy source of some kind? What is that?”

Inside, Tony was cackling over the utter predictability of Peter Parker when confronted with a new scientific puzzle, but he kept it covered on the outside so as to not startle the kid out of the moment. Sometimes dealing with the spider kid was a lot like dealing with an actual toddler-- you had to convince them that eating their vegetables was their idea.

“It’s called the Tesseract,” Tony explained. “Howard actually found it in the ocean decades ago when he was searching for Steve Rogers’ body.”

“What’s it do?” Peter took the tablet out of Tony’s hands entirely now, beginning to flip through the specs available there.

“Like you said,” Tony shrugged. “Self-sustaining clean energy source.”

Peter looked up. “But more complicated than that, right?”

“Yeah. A bit more complicated.”

A moment of consideration, a heavy breath, and then:

“Fuck you. Tell me about it.”

Chapter Text

The helicopter lowered itself down onto a massive, floating helicarrier, surrounded on all sides by ocean and buzzing with well-organized people and aircrafts even from where Peter peered down through his window.

“Holy shit, this is just out here?” Peter asked.

“What’s that mean?” Tony chuckled from beside him.

“Just-- I’ve never heard of this, but how do you keep a giant fucking helicarrier off the coast of Manhattan a secret?” Peter explained as they touched down, still with his face plastered to the window even as Tony unbuckled and began to step out.

“Come on, let’s get you a closer look, Spidey,” he said, pulling Peter’s attention back to him and forcing him to scramble out of the door and onto the tarmac.

He tried to hold his shoulders back, tried to look strong and authoritative, but the soldiers with guns were off-putting, and the implied firepower of this place had his spidey sense humming passively at the back of his neck as he followed Tony across the endless blacktop.

It was impossible not to let his head whip around at the cacophony of sights and sounds and smells of this little, massive island, and so he kept turning around and back again, looking up and down again, almost running straight into a man with an assault rifle but stepping back just in time again.

“Hey, you good?” Tony put a hand on his bicep as if to steady him. “You wanna chill out a little bit?”

“I’m fine,” Peter told him. “Just. A lot.”

Tony made a face as if to say fair enough and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get any words out, Peter’s head whipped around at the feeling of a familiar presence.

“Did you put him up to this?” Peter accused with a finger pointed straight at Natasha’s approaching form.

“No,” she smiled sharply. “But whoever did kinda nailed it, huh?”

Peter scowled even though neither of them could see it, simply because he hoped it was carrying over into his body language.

“I don’t like being manipulated,” he told her, maybe a little more harshly than necessary, but his spidey sense was making him anxious in this place.

Something stiffened in the way she was holding herself then.

“A friend of mine needs our help,” she said lowly. “So quite frankly, I don’t care.”

“Who?” Peter asked, immediately and unconsciously pushing aside some of his anger towards her at the same time that Tony muttered, “You have friends?”

“Clint Barton,” Natasha responded to Peter and ignored Tony. “Another agent. A good one.”

Peter clicked his jaw, having trouble putting together all of the pieces and senses trying to tune in to other conversations halfway across the tarmac instead of doing what he wanted, which was focusing on the conversation happening right in front of him.

He shook his head to shake it off and questioned, “I thought this was about that-- Tony what’s that thing called, again?”

“The Tesseract,” Tony responded. “But I have a feeling it’s all connected, right?” he lifted an eyebrow at Natasha, who just clenched her own jaw in response.

“We’ll connect the dots once the others are here,” she said. “You two can wait inside until take off.”

“Take off?” Peter asked, even as Tony had already started moving. “Wait, hold up--”

“Kid--”

“Are you telling me this thing flies?”

Natasha smirked at him. “I’ll see you inside.”

Peter gaped at her as she walked away, and stumbled over his own feet as Tony grabbed his forearm and essentially dragged him towards the entrance of the main structure.

“Tony--”

“I know.”

“It flies.”

“We’ll get you a souvenir keychain.”

***

The bridge itself was bustling with agents, and the longer Peter was here the more he realized he wouldn’t be taking his mask off any time soon if he cared at all about his identity.

Sure, Natasha and Fury knew Peter’s identity, but he knew for a fact that they were keeping it out of Shield records for him, had checked himself more than once and had Ned help him check a couple of more times after that, because contrary to the jokes made about his inability to keep a secret, Peter really did care about his anonymity and really did take it seriously.

So, the mask stayed on and if he spoke in a slightly deeper voice, let his Queens accent get a little bit heavier just to separate Spider-Man from Peter Parker one step more, that was his business.

They had been led to a room with a long conference-like table that overlooked the bridge via a massive glass window, and Peter watched intently, arms crossed over the spider emblem on his chest, as Fury and Agent Hill ran protocols to get them up in the air and, apparently, turn them invisible.

Because that was how they’d been keeping this thing a secret.

He watched agents typing away at their monitors, watched guards seal the doors to the outside, watched it all happen with practiced ease and precision of teamwork that Peter himself had never quite experienced.

“What’s going on now?” Peter asked impatiently, turning around to Tony who had his feet propped up on the table and a tablet in his hands-- presumably still studying the information that Shield had given him the day before. “How long are we gonna be here? Why are you so calm about this?”

“Come here,” Tony didn’t answer a single one of Peter’s questions, quite infuriatingly so in fact, and Peter huffed out an annoyed sound in response. Tony looked up at him with flat unamusement. “Come here. I’m gonna show you something.”

“I’m finding more and more that I don’t like it when you have things to show me,” Peter deadpanned, but he crossed the room and hopped up onto the table nonetheless, feet flat on the seat of a chair and elbows resting on knees.

“Check this out,” Tony turned the tablet around to face him, showing a number of running protocols and headshots of three different men.

Peter furrowed his brow. “What is this?”

“Facial search,” Tony explained. “We’re using every camera on the planet to try and find these guys-- security, laptops, cell phones-- if it’s got a lens we’re looking through it.”

“Privacy really is a myth, huh,” Peter muttered. “Who are they?”

“Barton’s the one on the left,” Tony told him.

“Nat’s friend.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “On the right we’ve got the guy who’s been studying our little Cube experiment…”

“And this guy?” Peter asked, pointing at the image. “In the middle.”

“Loki,” Tony explained. “Brother of Thor and literal god-slash-alien.”

Peter took two fingers and gently pushed the tablet away from him, back towards Tony who placed it in his lap without complaint.

“This is…” Peter began quietly. “This is way above my paygrade, Tony.”

“That’s why they’re bringing as many people as they can find in on this,” Tony told him, serious in a way that was relatively uncommon, quiet in a way that was certainly so. “Because it’s above everyone’s paygrade.”

The problem though, wasn’t that Peter didn’t want to help in whatever way he could-- he did want to do that, he always wanted to do that, it was his fatal flaw how much he felt responsible for helping everyone at all times and had led to more than one personal crisis in the years since he became Spider-Man. So no, that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that he felt terribly out of his league, that he didn’t belong in a place like this trying to accomplish a win like this. The problem was that for a while there, he was a lone agent, young and stupid and figuring out the hero gig with every mistake and success in equal measure, but never quite realizing that the hero gig could actually be a team sport.

And when you got down to it, that was the problem. Not knowing.

***

Michelle didn’t much like Times Square.

She didn’t like the crowds, she didn’t like the people that stopped walking in the middle of her path, she didn’t like the noise of the place that even her headphones couldn’t quite drown out, and so most of the time she managed to avoid it.

Today, however, she was working on an assignment for class-- a vérité sort of project about capturing the realism of people in their everyday lives. So she was in Times Square, because of rather than in spite of all the people for once, when one of the screens displaying news coverage, cut to a developing story.

Something, it would seem, was happening in Germany.

“We don’t have confirmation on who this man was yet,” the news broadcaster was saying with a hand to her ear as though listening to updates as she was passing them along in real time. “But witnesses-- and from some cell phone footage we’ve been able to get our hands on and will be showing momentarily-- we know that he had some sort of… Now, I don’t want to say magic powers on air, but-- Well, take a look at this.”

And Michelle did take a look, along with a lot of her fellow civilians, staring wide-eyed at the screen high up above them as a man with a glowing blue staff asked a crowd of terrified people to kneel and they did.

Michelle didn’t understand it, didn’t have the capacity to comprehend what was going on, especially when she continued to watch and saw Captain America appear on the shaky video being narrated by that same newscaster.

“What the fuck?” she said under her breath, putting the lens cap back on her camera and letting it hang heavy around her neck. And again, “What the fuck?” she said louder, when they began reporting that Iron Man had also been on the scene.

That was when her mind started racing, because if Tony was there-- If Tony was there and if Peter was on the phone with who she had assumed he had been on the phone with early that morning--

Michelle dug her cell phone out of her pocket and had it ringing and up to her ear in seven seconds flat, cursing to herself when it immediately went to voicemail.

She redialled. Voicemail.

One more time. Still voicemail.

“Hey, I know it’s a long shot,” she said to his voicemail box. “But when you ran away this morning you didn’t happen to leave the country, right? Call me back.”

Michelle hung up, but immediately started dialing again, already walking towards the nearest subway station as she did so.

“MJ--”

“Hey, are you watching the news?”

“I just saw,” Ned replied on the other end of the line. “Literally so crazy, but at least it’s not New York again, right? Like, Christ, I hate to say it but it really was time for someone else to take a turn with this mystical shit--”

“Ned,” she cut him off. “I was with Peter this morning, he got a call, ran off, and now his phone is going straight to voicemail.”

A beat of quiet. A sharp intake of breath.

“Shit.”

“I take that to mean he’s not at home with a dead phone?” she asked.

“Definitely not,” Ned replied.

Michelle started walking faster, pushing past a family who was trying to ask her to take their picture as though they thought she was some Humans of New York photographer.

“I know I sound paranoid, but--”

“I’ll try to track him down,” Ned assured her. “You going to May’s?”

“Yeah,” she exhaled, a little bit relieved that her worry was taken seriously. But of course it would be by him-- he’d seen just as much shit as she had. “You’ll meet me there later if you don’t hear anything?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, okay,” she blabbered on nervously as she raced across the street against the flow of foot traffic.

“MJ? He’s gonna be okay.”

“I know.”

“He’s always okay.”

“I know,” she said, knowing that one day that was going to stop being true, knowing that Ned knew that too, and knowing on top of both of those things that they could never say it out loud.

She kept moving.

***

Tony had joined the little party in Germany without being asked, but only because he wanted to.

He was curious about Loki and he was curious about Captain fucking America, so sue him, he dropped by and gave the guy a hand. What he hadn’t thought through all the way was the fact that he now had to sit on the jet with this little amalgamation of strangers, enemies, and his father’s favorite son all the way back to the helicarrier.

So. A loss for foresight for the day, but that wasn’t anything new.

“I don’t like it,” Steve said, under his breath as though the cockpit was far enough away from their guest for him not to hear.

“What, that Rock of Ages is giving up so easily?”

“I don’t remember it being that easy,” Steve shook his head. “And this guy packs a wallop.”

“Well, you are pretty spry for an older gentleman,” Tony teased lightly, testing the waters a little bit on just how old fashioned his new, old pal was.

The look that Steve gave him, however, was relatively unreadable, so Tony was going to try again, keep his rambling going for a moment when a familiar voice filtered out through the cockpit’s speakers.

“Hey? Hello? Anybody there?”

Tony whipped his head around to look at Natasha.

“How’d he get into your comms?” he asked accusingly.

“How’d he learn how to build a fucking arc reactor?” she shot back before pressing down on her own comm button to respond. “Spider-Man? That you?”

“Nat! Yes, hello,” Peter’s voice filled the cockpit. “Is everyone okay? I was trying to ask Fury and then I tried to ask Hill and then I tried to ask a bunch of people I don’t know, but no one wants to talk to me?”

“Shocking, that,” Tony said flatly.

“Tony?”

“Yeah, kid, right here.”

“You good, old man?”

“Yeah,” Tony rolled his eyes, ignoring the curious look he was getting from Mister America. “We’re all peachy, Spidey. How’d you get into Shield’s comms though? Just out of curiosity.”

“I’m… Borrowing a unit from an agent?”

“Klepto.”

“You left me here-- after kidnapping me, I might add--”

“Kidnapping?” Steve furrowed his brow in concern.

“And I don’t even have cell service up here and I got bored,” Peter finished.

“First of all,” Natasha cut in. “Only you could get bored on a flying helicarrier. And second of all, keep the comms clear in case of emergency, Spider-Man.”

“Right, my bad,” Peter did sound genuinely apologetic at that. “See you soon.”

“See you soon,” Natasha repeated and then shut off comms with a flick of her wrist.

“Who was that?” Steve asked with the voice of a man who was getting a little tired of asking questions that everyone else already knew the answers to. In all fairness, Tony really couldn’t blame the guy for that frustration, not after his less than clear-cut run-ins with Shield in recent years.

“Spider-Man,” Tony told him simply. “Yes, he’s that annoying all the time, but he also has a moral compass to rival yours so you might actually like him. At least-- fifty percent of the time.”

“Spider-Man, right,” Steve nodded. “He was in the files Shield gave me, but there, uh, wasn’t a picture. Is he… Um…” he looked uncomfortable as he made a motion with his fingers, but Tony understood it for the hilarious question it was.

Does he have all the legs?

Tony just cackled, watching as the corner of Natasha’s lip quirked up.

Neither of them answered his question.

***

Peter wasn’t lying when he said he was bored, which was how he found himself wandering the halls of the helicarrier pretty aimlessly while he waited for an opportunity to be useful. Or to use a phone to call home.

Whichever one came first really.

He had found control rooms and armories and what seemed to be bunks for agents that presumably stayed onboard for long stretches of time.

And then he found the lab. Spacious and bright and littered with holoscreens of every shape and size and-- Yeah, Peter wasn’t bored anymore.

No one else was in the lab at the moment, but there was a work station up and running at the largest table on the other side of the room so, naturally, Peter made his way over and began to flip through the various programs running.

It may not have been his strong suit, but Peter had spent enough time trying to figure out his own post-bite genetic makeup to recognize a scan for gamma radiation when he saw it. He lifted a hand, began to scroll slowly through the information catalogued before him, and then was startled a step backwards when he saw the door to the lab slide open out of the corner of his eye.

“Oh my-- Hi. Hello, hey,” fell out of Peter’s mouth before he could string together an actual coherent sentence, making his chest heat up and a blush spread up his neck underneath the suit.

“Hello?” Doctor Bruce Banner said, mug in hand as the door slid shut behind him.

“You’re Doctor Banner,” Peter gawked. “Doctor Bruce Banner.”

Something like dread passed across the man’s face as his shoulders shrunk his frame down a fraction of an inch and Peter mentally reprimanded himself. He hadn’t meant it in that way-- not in the way that Bruce obviously took it. He meant it like--

“I’m a big fan,” Peter took a few hurried steps around the side of the desk, noticing how Bruce hadn’t come much further into the room. “Of your work. I mean, I’ve studied-- You’ve done so much for the scientific community.”

Dread shifted to confusion. That was a step.

“You’re a scientist?” Bruce questioned. “Spider-Man is a scientist?”

Peter grimaced, not knowing how to answer that question without giving away his age and student status and just-- more than he was ready to give away at that point.

“Yes?” he decided to go with. “Sort of. I have an-- interest.”

Bruce nodded in acknowledgment, and then finally stepped closer, moving to the workstation that Peter had been investigating.

“I’ve read-- I mean, pretty much everything you’ve written. The stuff on antielectron collisions? Fucking unparalled,” Peter gushed, not ready to let this go. It was Bruce fucking Banner, after all. “But specifically the gamma radiation stuff was super helpful when I was still figuring out all of… y’know,” he motioned broadly to himself.

“Your enhancements?” Bruce questioned curiously, looking less like a timid man who didn’t want to be there and more like the scientist that Peter had been admiring since high school with every passing moment. “They’re radiation-induced?”

“Partially, yeah,” Peter grimaced under his mask. “Had a bit of a run-in with a radioactive spider, so I’m not entirely positive what all was going on there, but it fucked the structure of my DNA all up and the stuff in your research was the most similar change that I could find out there.”

“So, is the suit because…?”

“Oh!” Peter got where he was going. “No, it didn’t change me physically really-- except by, like, giving me muscle that I super did not have before,” he chuckled. “The mask is just an anonymity thing.”

“That I can understand,” Bruce said with a breath of bitter laughter, and Peter felt his heart twinge for the man.

Peter complained a lot about Parker Luck, about how things had a tendency to go wrong in his life, but when it came to the whole radioactive spider bite thing, he could have been infinitely less lucky than he was. He could have died, he could have faced a fate more similar to what Bruce himself had, with enhancements he couldn’t just figure out how to control with a little bit of research and practice.

Anything could have happened, but instead he had this opportunity-- to take some fluke of the universe and use it to help people, and realizations like that always reminded him to be grateful for his Parker blood.

Ben always said they had optimism baked into their genes, after all.

“Do you think-- I mean, would you mind,” Peter blurted out. “Um… Maybe showing me what you’re doing?”

Bruce studied him, cautious but also seemingly intrigued. Peter had a way of doing that to people.

“I could help?” Peter suggested with a shrug.

During the moment of consideration that Bruce rightfully took, Peter circled one hand around the band of his web shooter on the other wrist, wishing for a moment that he could have met this man as Peter Parker-- the brains of the operation.

“You know much about tracing radiation signatures?” Bruce asked.

“I’m a fast learner,” Peter responded eagerly.

Bruce let out a breath. “Alright, get over here.”

***

Tony had seen quite a bit by this point in his life, but he had never seen something quite like this.

Who would have thought that you could steal a prisoner off of a moving jet, after all?

Chasing after the God of Thunder and his little brother in the Iron Man suit made him think about the last time he’d been caught in a pursuit like this and tangentially made him wish that Rhodey wasn’t overseas during this whole debacle.

Maybe if he had been on stateside, they wouldn’t have needed to drag the kid into it at all, but as it stood, Tony was getting more convinced by the minute that there was something bigger going on here than even the big-wigs at Shield were aware of.

He just couldn’t see what it was yet past the big, stupid horns and magic hammer.

“I have seen the true power of the Tesseract,” Tony’s sensors picked up from somewhere below him, at the top of the cliff face. “And when I wield it--”

“Who showed you this power?” Thor, and he sounded angry. “Who controls the would-be king?”

“I am the king!”

“Not here!”

“Jarvis, have we got heat signatures?”

“Searching now, Sir.”

“You give up the Tesseract,” Thor continued. “You give up this poisonous dream… You come home.”

Just as Loki began to respond to that particular plea, Tony caught sight of two bright heat signatures in his HUD and dove for them on instinct. Could he have taken a moment to consider his actions and determined which brother was which? Perhaps.

But Tony was more a man of action than of planning, so he made an educated guess and at the bottom of his dive pulled up just enough to ram bodily into one of the figures, sending both of them flying yards away into a dirt clearing between the trees.

It was Thor, pushing himself up off the ground as Tony stood and lifted his face plate, which meant their person of interest was left somewhere behind them.

“Do not touch me again,” Thor demanded but Tony, for all his personal growth in the past year and a half, still didn’t love being told what to do, and thus responded as such.

“Then don’t take my stuff.”

“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” Thor told him with all seriousness.

Tony glanced over his shoulder where they’d left Loki. “Uh,” he said. “Shakespeare in the Park?”

“Loki will face Asgardian justice,” Thor insisted, ignoring what Tony thought was really a very good joke. Too bad a fellow New Yorker hadn’t been around to hear it.

“He gives up the Cube, he’s all yours,” Tony offered. “Until then, stay out of the way.”

In retrospect, he should have maybe seen the hammer coming.

***

“You got into a fight with a god?!”

“A minor squabble,” Tony brushed Peter off as he attached his suit to a monitor where Jarvis could recalibrate the power cells after being overcharged by… magic lightning.

“But you got the guy, right?” Peter asked eagerly. “Loki? He’s here?”

“He’s in a containment cell,” Tony looked at the kid, could see the curiosity in the mere posture of his shoulders. “Which you will not be visiting. Understand?”

“But, Tony--”

“Why are you on this Earth if not to cause trouble on purpose?” he finished what wouldn’t have been the rest of that sentence, but got the gist of it nonetheless. “I dunno, maybe to not do that?”

“Doctor Banner is more fun than you,” Peter pushed off the wall where he was leaning and walked towards the door.

“Banner?” Tony lifted a curious look to Peter. “Bruce Banner? Is he here?”

“He’s been trying to trace the Cube by its radiation output,” Peter paused in the doorway, smile in his voice and obviously unable to resist a conversation like this. “He’s been teaching me.”

“Should he be in an enclosed space this high up in the air?” Tony questioned.

He could practically feel the way Peter frowned at him from behind his mask.

“He’s actually a really cool guy,” he insisted. “You should be nice to him.”

Tony made a face. “We should all probably be nice to him.”

***

It was strange, Peter thought, to be in that room with those people-- people who were, for lack of a better phrasing, like him.

With special abilities, parts of them that were literally or figuratively inhuman, and more than that, something pulling them towards this call to action. Protection of a friend, protection of themselves, protection of a world-- they all had a reason for being there, watching the security footage as Fury locked up Loki and explained to him just how little chance he had of escaping.

Now, despite doing what he did, Peter wasn’t much of a law-and-order type guy. He wasn’t friends with the police-- not by a long shot-- and he spent most of his time (discounting the occasional maniac in a ridiculous costume) out on the streets deescalating terrible circumstances between desperate people or helping people who thought they had no other options to find other options.

So he didn’t love the idea of locking this guy up without a trial, but he also knew he probably didn’t have all the details. Because he very rarely had all the details these days.

“It’s an impressive cage,” Loki said over the feed that they were watching-- Peter and his new acquaintances which included a literal god and Captain America himself. “Not built, I think, for me.”

“No,” Fury responded. “Built for something a lot stronger than you.”

Peter could hear the way Bruce’s clothes rustled as he shifted on his feet.

“Oh, I’ve heard,” Loki said, and although Peter was too far away, sitting backwards in a chair at the other end of the table, he could tell by Natasha’s reaction that he had found the security camera with his eyes. “A mindless beast. Makes play he’s still a man.”

Bruce’s smile was bitter and self-deprecating and Peter may be acting largely off of a case of nerd-worship, but he still ached for a world that was a little less cruel to this man who had so much to offer.

“How desperate are you,” Loki continued. “That you call on such lost creatures to defend you?”

Thor had his back to them all, Steve stood tall with his arms crossed and a furrowed brow, and Tony, like Peter, was sitting at the table and observing, listening.

“How desperate am I?” Fury reiterated. “You threaten my world with war; you steal a force you can’t hope to control; you talk about peace and you kill because it’s fun. You have made me very desperate. And you might not be glad that you did.”

The feed cut out, and for a moment there was quiet amongst them all. There was no chance that Peter would be the first to speak, not when he was still in awe of where he was and who these people were, not when not too long ago he was losing his mind over the possibility of losing Iron Man, because he had finally found one other person who understood Spider-Man’s life.

Luckily, Bruce cut the quiet before Peter’s incessant need to fill silence took over.

“He really grows on you, huh?”

Peter couldn’t hold back a snort of laughter at that, but ducked his head when Natasha looked across the table at him, bouncing his leg restlessly but otherwise trying to remain in the background for the moment.

This was so unbelievably above his paygrade.

“Loki’s gonna drag this out,” Captain fucking America said, steady as expected and strong, even just standing there. “Thor. What’s his play?”

“He has an army called the Chitauri,” Thor explained. “They’re not of Asgard, nor of any world known.”

“Aliens,” Natasha said more simply with a simple tilt of her head.

“Aliens,” Steve sighed heavily. “Of course.”

And Peter had really wanted to keep his mouth shut, but sometimes it wasn’t really up to him, especially not when he had the mask on and was feeling a bit more like a super-powered vigilante and less like Peter Parker who got bullied for twelve years of public school.

“I mean, I had to read about your death every year of middle school social studies,” he said with a wave of a hand in Steve’s direction. “But there you are, so I guess nothing’s really far-fetched anymore, dude.”

Steve looked at him appraisingly, and with a little bit of shock, but Thor ignored the outburst and continued.

“He means to lead the Chitauri against your people...”

Tony leaned over to Peter from where he was sitting, whispering like they were in high school instead of at a meeting about the essential end of the world even as the others continued to discuss Loki’s plan.

“Did you just call Captain America dude?” he asked under his breath.

“I regret it, don’t worry,” Peter replied, face buried in his forearms where they rested on the back of his chair.

“So he’s building another portal,” Bruce said as Peter’s ears tuned back into the conversation at hand. “That’s what he needs Erik Selvig for.”

“Selvig?” Peter was the one whispering to Tony now.

“Third guy we were face-tracing,” Tony explained. “Astrophysicist. You should read some of his stuff-- I’ll give it to you.”

“Loki has him under some kind of spell,” Natasha explained. “Along with one of ours.”

Peter could see the turmoil in her posture, even if she wasn’t actually showing it outwardly.

“I want to know why Loki let us take him,” Steve said. “He’s not leading an army from here.”

Bruce scoffed. “I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki,” he pointed out. “The guy’s brain is a bag full of cats. You could smell crazy on him.”

“So was Justin Hammer,” Peter said, out loud and full volume and dragging everyone’s gaze straight to him in a way he hadn’t really been prepared for. “Um. I just meant-- Nevermind.”

“Who’s Justin Hammer?” Steve asked, earnest gaze not leaving Peter.

Peter looked to Tony, not for permission so much as to see a familiar face, before sitting up a bit straighter in his seat.

“He almost blew up New York last year,” he explained to the room at large. “Absolute moron, never built a working piece of weaponry in his fucking life, but the guy was working for someone, right?” he directed that last bit to Natasha who nodded. “He was working for someone-- although, you still won’t tell me who which is super uncool-- but it was because of that connection to someone higher up that he managed to turn Stark Expo into something outta one of those shitty Transformers movies.”

“His point is,” Tony translated flatly. “That just because Loki’s in the drunk tank, doesn’t mean there’s no reason to worry about him. Which I have to agree with.”

“He did kill eighty people in two days,” Natasha agreed.

“Either way, we need to look at the mechanics,” Bruce said. “The iridium. What does he need iridium for?”

“Finally, something interesting,” Tony clapped his hands together and stood up from his lounged position. “It’s a stabilizing agent.”

“Oh,” Peter muttered in the same tone of voice that one might say duh.

“See, I still have things to teach you, young buck,” Tony pointed at him. “It means what?”

“That the portal won’t collapse,” Peter said. “It literally stabilizes it.”

“Which was what was missing in the portal at Shield,” Tony finished. “Which is why that whole thing… y’know…” he made an explosion sound and motioned glibly with his hands.

“I’m sorry, this is confusing me,” Steve motioned between Peter and Tony. “Who exactly are you?” he asked Peter.

“Spider-Man.”

“He seems to be a student of the man of metal,” Thor chimed in. “Correct?”

“Yes,” Tony said at the same time that Peter let out an emphatic, “No.”

“You’re his… mentor?” Steve asked.

“Exactly, great observation skills, Cap’n.”

“None of those things are true,” Peter deadpanned.

“You know what else the iridium does?” Tony continued on unbothered as he walked up to the screens at the head of the bridge. “It means the portal can stay open as wide and for as long as Loki wants.”

“The Chitauri are many,” Thor said. “The siege could be endless.”

“Like, figuratively?” Peter asked. “Or…?”

“Endless,” Thor repeated, looking straight at Peter and making him shrink down in his seat, nodding.

“Cool. Endless. Very not good.”

“The rest of the raw materials,” Tony said, now typing and swiping at the screens in front of him. “Barton can get his hands on pretty easily. The only major component he still needs is a power source of high-energy density.”

“To kick start the Cube,” Peter finished, mostly to himself.

“And you aren’t his student?” Bruce asked quizzically.

“He works for me,” Tony said.

“I used to work for him but I quit because it was a toxic workplace,” Peter shot Tony a look that he hoped could be read just via the narrowing of his eye lenses.

“Underoos, we have bigger fish to fry than your HR complaints,” Tony said with faux-disappointment. “Come on, get it together.”

“How are you so certain of all this?” Hill asked, breaking her stoic silence to level a look at Tony. “When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?”

Tony looked at her, and then, as if it was the simplest thing in the world: “Last night.”

The problem was, after spending as much time in the lab with Tony as he had, Peter knew that was probably entirely accurate.

“The packet Coulson gave me,” he continued. “Selvig’s notes, the extraction theory papers-- Am I the only one who did the reading?”

Peter raised his hand above his head and proclaimed, “I would like the record to show that I did not have the opportunity. On account of having been kidnapped.”

Steve frowned. “That’s the second time he’s-- Are you here against your will, son?”

“He’s fine,” Tony said while Peter very seriously implored, “Yes, I am.”

“Ignore them,” Natasha cut in flatly. “It makes everything easier, trust me.”

“Fine,” Steve sighed heavily. “Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?”

“He’d have to heat the Cube to 120-million Kelvin,” Bruce said, fiddling with his hands in front of him-- either self soothing or a nervous tick, Peter couldn’t tell either way. “Just to break through the Coulomb barrier.”

“Unless,” Tony cut in as he made his way back to the main table they were situated around. “Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect.”

“Well, if he could do that he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet,” Bruce said, and Peter kind of wished he’d brought a notebook so he could write some of this stuff down.

Seriously-- Tony Stark and Bruce Banner? It was like sitting in on the coolest guest lecture of all time. Ned was going to lose his shit over this story.

“You were right,” Tony gestured to Peter as he passed him on his way to stand beside Bruce. “This guy is fun.”

Bruce looked at Peter with a little bit of bewilderment, but he took the hand Tony offered and shook it nonetheless. Beside Peter, Steve mumbled something about not knowing what fun was, and Peter kept his laughter to himself, assuming he was the only one that had heard it.

“I’ve been helping him track the Cube,” Peter turned to Tony. “You should help.”

Tony nodded agreeably and Steve suggested, “I would start with that stick of his. It may be magical but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon.”

“I learned about them in social studies too,” Peter blurted out. Tony shoved at the side of his head to get him to shut up.

“I don’t know about Hydra in this case,” Natasha said. “But we do believe it’s powered by the Cube.”

“We’ll work on it,” Tony assured her. “Shall we, Doctor?”

“This way,” Bruce motioned with an arm and a hunch of his shoulders as he led Tony away from the bridge.

“Come on, Spidey,” Tony called over his shoulder as everyone else began to disperse.

“Yeah, be right there-- Hey,” Peter looked to Steve, the last one left of the bunch. “They didn’t happen to give you a super fancy Shield phone when you came back from the dead, did they? It’s only-- I’m supposed to call a friend of mine this afternoon, or at least text her, but I don’t have any service up here and if she doesn’t hear from me-- Well-- I just sorta have a history of, like, trouble? So if you had a phone I could borrow that would be. Nice.”

“I… I don’t,” Steve said as Peter began to realize that one, Captain America didn’t care about the girl he was almost dating and two, Captain America probably didn’t know much about texting or cell service to begin with.

“Right, no, sorry,” Peter shook his head. “Thanks anyway,” he waved and was just about to leave the bridge when--

“Kid?”

“Yes, Sir?” Peter spun around, cringing internally at the formality. He’d been pushing it down, despite the piece of Ben still sitting at the back of his head and reminding him about manners and respect, because he didn’t want them to see him as young-- naive.

But looking at Steve Rogers right in the eye? It was really hard to ignore that urge.

“You’re from New York?” Steve asked, something like hope in his earnest face.

“Queens,” Peter grinned, tilting his head like a challenge.

Steve nodded, smiling back at him. “Brooklyn.”

“Yeah,” Peter laughed brightly. “I know.”

He turned on his heel and walked away with a skip in his step.

Spider-Man had a job to do.

Chapter Text

“Still nothing?” Michelle asked, watching as May let out a heavy breath and shook her head as she hung up the phone for the umpteenth time in the past hour.

They were all gathered around May’s small kitchen table, working on their own tasks while simultaneously trying to get in touch with Peter-- this person they loved who had too much of a penchant for trouble for any of their liking.

“He’s probably just at the Tower, right?” Ned suggested hopefully. “He’s probably in the lab with a dead phone--”

“It’s been hours, Ned,” Michelle cut him off. “And he told me he would call me this afternoon, but he-- hasn’t.”

“Okay,” May began steadily. “We’ve done this before, we know that sometimes he’s not able to reach out right away, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Michelle chewed on the inside of her cheek.

“And we know that he knows we worry when he disappears,” May continued. “So he’ll call. As soon as he’s able, he’ll call.”

Michelle hummed in agreement, could feel Ned’s worried eyes on her as she bounced her knee under the table and tried to accept that she couldn’t know everything all the time no matter how hard she tried or prepared or just simply wanted to.

“I’m gonna call Pepper,” she pushed out of her chair and began pacing the length of the living room where it sat lined up neatly against the kitchen.

“MJ--”

“She’ll be able to contact Tony right? And see if something is up?”

“I mean, probably,” Ned shrugged. May got up to make more tea.

Michelle really didn’t know how she was so calm about this stuff, how she had so much faith in her idiot of a nephew to come home at the end of the day. Maybe it had something to do with the amount of loss she’d suffered in her life, or maybe it had to do with the fact she had already accepted that one day he might not.

Neither one of those were things Michelle could properly comprehend though, so she tapped away at her phone, held it to her ear while the dial tone rang, and at the sound of an answering click--

“Pepper?”

“Hello? Michelle?”

“Hi, yeah, I’m so sorry to bother you out of the blue,” Michelle stopped walking, scratching at the upholstery on the back of the couch with the nail of her index finger. “I was just wondering if you’ve talked to Tony today?”

“Not since last night,” Pepper responded, vague concern coloring her tone. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah-- No, yeah,” Michelle said incomprehensibly. “I’m just trying to find out if maybe Peter is with him.”

“You don’t know where Peter is?” she extrapolated quickly and efficiently, in proper Pepper Potts fashion.

“He got a call this morning and had to rush off,” Michelle explained. “But none of us have been able to get ahold of him since, so I just thought-- if Tony was with him, that would be our answer.”

Pepper hummed out something like understanding on the other end of the line-- it didn’t settle Michelle’s heart in her throat.

“Tony had a visit from Agent Coulson last night,” she said.

“Agent?” Michelle’s blood went cold. “Like Shield?”

“Apparently Peter had been dodging their calls,” Pepper explained. “If you can’t get ahold of him…”

“They probably have,” Michelle finished the thought as she met Ned and May’s gazes from across the room. “Well,” she said. “That makes everything a bit more complicated."

***

Tony hadn’t quite known what to expect from Bruce Banner personality wise, but the guy was definitely meeting all of Tony’s predictions for his intelligence levels. They were in the helicarrier’s lab together, beginning the work of tracking down the Tesseract, and the whole situation was creating quite the fun dichotomy in how Peter was presenting himself.

The kid clearly wanted Bruce to think he was older than he was, but was still completely incapable of holding back the enthusiastic student behind the mask-- asking questions and making astute, if not quite fully-formed connections to some of his own readings on matters of radiation.

And Tony was pretty sure Bruce didn’t know what to make of him, this bundle of nervous energy and his overflowing stream of ideas, but it was fun to watch all the same. Perhaps even more so.

“The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selvig’s reports of the Tesseract,” Bruce said while he scanned Loki’s staff and imported the readings onto the holoscreen in front of him. “But it’s going to take weeks to process.”

“If we bypass their mainframe and direct route to the Homer cluster,” Tony responded, tapping away at a screen of his own while Peter sat cross-legged on the desk beside him. “We can clock this at around 600 teraflops.”

Bruce looked at the screen that Tony was working on-- clearly his own and brought from home-- and chuckled.

“All I brought was a toothbrush,” he joked as he continued to work.

“All I brought was nothing,” Peter chimed in. “Because of the kidnapping.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “You gotta get over that,” he waved a hand at Peter. “Pretty sure the Captain is half-convinced we’ve spider-trafficked you.”

“I’ll get over it eventually,” Peter spun on his butt to track Tony’s movements over to Bruce’s workstation with the staff. “But for now you’re still on thin ice.”

“Hey,” Tony directed his attention to Bruce, ignoring the kid as he hopped off his perch and began futzing with the work Tony had left behind. “You should come by Stark Tower sometime-- top ten floors, all R&D. You’d get a kick out of it.”

“You totally should, Doctor Banner,” Peter gushed and Tony didn’t feel at all like he was being replaced as the cool, eccentric scientist guy in Peter Parker’s life. “It’s like Candy Land up there, I swear.”

“Thanks, guys,” Bruce chuckled. “But the last time I was in New York I kind of-- broke Harlem.”

Tony remembered that debacle and had been in California at the time, but now that he thought about it (and as he noticed Peter’s posture shift) the kid would’ve been in New York. Probably no more than thirteen or fourteen years old, before Spider-Man came into the picture, he would’ve just been an actual child, watching it on the news at his aunt and uncle’s house.

Tony wanted to change the subject, distract from the issue before Peter could get his sticky hands in it, but before he could--

“I’m sorry about what they did to you,” Peter said, reminding Tony of the earnest intern that had shown up at his lab a year ago-- because you’re dying-- and maybe showing Bruce for the first time that there was more to him than the surface level snarky deflection. “I mean-- I was lucky, y’know? I was reckless and I ended up with all this,” he motioned to himself. “But it’s not too difficult to hide from people that would want to take advantage of it. But you… You’re not a weapon, and you don’t deserve to be treated like one.”

Bruce’s face softened, some piece of his own mask crumbling away with the magic of Peter Parker’s good-heartedness.

“Thank you,” he said sincerely, but Peter just shrugged, turning back to the screen in front of him.

“Hey, if the police or the military or whatever ever gets their hands on me,” he said, teasing note back in his voice despite the dark topic. “You can make it up to me by teaching me how you hid so well.”

For a beat of quiet, Tony thought maybe Peter had taken it a step too far with a joke like that, unable to read the look on Bruce’s face right up until the point he exhaled a startled breath of laughter that seemed to catch all three of them off guard. It was the first sign of genuine humor underneath all of Bruce’s obvious personal boundaries, and Tony couldn’t help the way the corner of his lip quirked up at the sound of it.

“And in the meantime,” he said. “We can offer you a stress-free environment.”

“Oh, definitely,” Peter deadpanned.

“No tension, no surprises,” he jabbed Bruce in the side with a pen, earning an indignant hey! from the man and a quiet laugh from the kid.

He wasn’t sure when, but at some point it seemed that he and Peter had agreed to prove to Bruce Banner that they weren’t afraid of him. Tony wasn’t sure it was working yet, with the scowl that Bruce was giving him, but the foundation of the thing was there.

“Hey, Doctor Banner,” Peter spoke up, effectively drawing Bruce’s attention back to him. “You don’t happen to be getting service up here right? I was supposed to call someone this afternoon.”

Bruce gave him a funny look. So did Tony, to be fair, but for different reasons.

“I don’t have a cell phone,” Bruce said simply. “Because I’ve been on the run from the military for about seven years?”

The lenses on Peter’s mask got wider and he somehow expressed sheepishness just in the line of his shoulders alone.

“Right,” he nodded too fast for too long. “Obviously. That’s my bad.”

“No worries,” Bruce assured him, but Tony immediately jabbed him in the side again.

“Still no worries?” he squinted at an indignant Bruce as Steve stormed in with an exclamation of, “Are you crazy?”

“Yeah, but for reasons other than that,” Peter motioned at Tony with a broad sweep of his hand.

“The jury has spoken,” Tony said with a sarcastic tilt of his head before turning back to Bruce. “You really do have a lid on it, don’t you? What’s your secret?”

Tony could feel Steve’s exasperation from where he stood on the other side of the table, could feel Peter observing the whole lot of them from a few yards away, closer to the door as it was becoming clearer and clearer he tended to do when amongst strangers.

Once, a few months after the whole Hammer debacle, Peter had mentioned something of a sixth sense that came along with his powers-- a danger sense that helped him dodge to safety even before his conscious brain was aware that he was unsafe.

Tony wondered in this moment whether that spidey sense was going off, and whether it had more to do with the people in the lab or with the Shield-ness of it all. Either way, he was getting better at being able to tell when Peter was on edge, and it felt like the kid was getting ready to bolt.

“Is everything a joke to you?” Steve dragged Tony’s gaze back to him, to the big shining star on his chest.

“You know what,” Peter tapped his fingers on the desk anxiously. “I’m gonna go find a working phone. I’ll catch you guys later,” he moved for the door quickly, not waiting for permission to leave or to wander.

“Spider-Man?” Tony called after him, waiting for Peter to turn at the doorway before he continued. “Pep’s got the jet in DC today.”

A beat. Peter nodded his understanding. “Thanks, Tony.”

“Sure thing, kid,” Tony waved him off and watched him leave.

“Should he be wandering around on his own?” Steve asked, and now that got a genuine snort out of Tony.

“He’s fine. Chill, Capscicle.”

The eye contact he was making was intermittent at best, and he hoped it came across as nonchalant rather than what it really was-- an avoidance of a too-familiar face that had haunted his upbringing with all that strength and power and moral integrity.

“We need to stay focused on the problem at hand,” Steve said. “I know Agent Romanoff said that Spider-Man is an asset, and don’t get me wrong, I like him-- but he seems awfully young to me, and we can’t be trying to keep track of him with the rest of this going on.”

“He’s actually been very helpful,” Bruce said, which seemed to settle Steve at least a little bit.

It made Tony blanche a little, but if Steve trusting Bruce more than Tony was what it took to get them all off Peter’s back then at least that was something.

“He also has a point, y’know,” Tony said. “With all his vague distrust of Shield. I mean-- Why did Fury call us now? Why not before? Can’t really do the equation without all the variables.”

Steve considered this. Tony watched him consider it as his hands fiddled with some tool or implement or other-- he wasn’t really paying attention.

“Do you think Fury’s hiding something?”

“I think Fury is a spy,” Tony replied flatly. “Like. The spy. The guy’s secrets have secrets.”

***

Peter hadn’t lied about looking for a phone so he could check in with his people, but that also wasn’t his only reason for wanting to get a look around.

He was curious by nature-- too curious according to some, although it did work out in his favor every once in a while-- and couldn’t ignore the pull he was feeling towards the guy with the horns and the magic powers.

So it didn’t surprise him, and certainly shouldn’t have surprised anyone, that when he came across the entrance to the room that contained Loki’s cage, he found his way inside.

“Wow, that really is some prison, huh?” Peter said as he stepped around the glass, earning a curious look from the man inside and a sharp hum from his danger sense.

“They sent you to interrogate me?” Loki questioned, a certain amount of surprise to his tone that Peter hadn’t really expected from a man who seemed to want the high ground at all times.

“Not really,” Peter answered honestly. “Just sorta ended up in here. Happens sometimes. But if you wanted to tell me where the Tesseract was, I wouldn’t be opposed to that.”

“Of course,” Loki smiled darkly, hands behind his back.

“Nothing?” Peter asked glibly. “Well. Worth a shot I guess.”

He hopped up on the rail across from Loki’s cage and let his feet dangle as he observed the man.

“How does the teleporting work?” he asked, figuring this was probably his only chance to have that question answered. “I saw your whole thing in Germany-- The illusory appearance, the jumping from one spot to another. How’s the molecular displacement work with that?”

“Ah,” Loki smirked at him. “A scientist?”

“Yeah, you too?”

“A sorcerer.”

“Kinda the same thing,” Peter said off-handedly. “All that Asgardian stuff that people call magic here-- it really is just science for you guys right? It’s one of the fundamentals of how your world works.”

“In a way, I suppose,” Loki responded, and Peter got the distinct feeling that he was being humored. It was a familiar experience for him.

“Oh, well, what would I know?” Peter brushed it off, just to see how he’d respond.

“No, you are intelligent. I can tell,” Loki said with a smirk. “Tell me, does it not pain you? To know that the Tesseract carries such power-- such unlimited power-- and that your people would use it for what? A warm light for all mankind?”

“I dunno, man,” Peter tilted his head to the side, shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly. “I feel like mankind could use a nice warm light for a lot of things. Look at-- fucking-- solar power, for one. Vitamin D.”

Loki might have responded to that, but before he had the opportunity, the door that Peter had originally come through opened to reveal a disapproving face.

“Spider-Man.”

“Hey,” Peter grimaced at Natasha and sheepishly slid down from his perch. “I was just-- leaving.”

“Yes, you were,” she responded, crossing her arms as he walked towards the exit and, by way of passing, her.

“Look,” he paused beside her before leaving. “I know there’s probably someone less important I could ask about this but-- Can I borrow your phone?”

Natasha scowled at him in the way he assumed a big sister would have, had Peter not been an only child, but then pulled a phone off her belt and pressed it into his chest.

“Get outta here,” she told him. “They could use you back in the lab.”

“You’re a lifesaver,” he said, walking backwards out of the room and already dialling a familiar number before the door was even fully shut behind him.

“Hello?” she picked up with equal parts hesitance and hope.

“Em?”

“Oh, thank God,” Michelle exhaled. “Where the fuck are you? We’ve been trying to get in touch with you all day and you weren’t picking up.”

“It’s a long story, and essentially I don’t have service at the moment but I wanted to make sure you were all okay,” he said as he found an alcove along the hallway and tucked himself into it for some semblance of privacy.

“Ned and I have been at May’s for a few hours,” Michelle told him. “I just stepped out to pick up food but I’m on my way back there so you can talk to them then.”

“I don’t really have a lot of time,” Peter sighed. “I wish I did, but I’m gonna need you to just pass all this along for me, I’m sorry, MJ.”

He heard her take a deep breath, heard the sounds of the city as she presumably walked down the street. It was familiar, it was home, it was somewhere he’d much rather be than stuck in the middle of this mess that he still didn’t fully understand.

“Pete, what’s going on?” she asked, quiet but determined. “Is this about what happened in Germany?”

“Sort of,” Peter responded. “It’s all complicated and I don’t think I have all the details even, but I think you guys should maybe hunker down for the rest of the day. Stay with May and just-- look out for each other until we know for sure we have a handle on this. And Call Pepper--”

“Peter--”

“Because if you need to get out of the city, you can take the jet--”

“That’s not happening--”

“Michelle, this isn’t some fucking guy with a rhino suit, this is big, okay?” Peter begged her to understand. “I wouldn’t be telling you all this if it didn’t feel important. This is me trying to keep you in the loop. You know that, right?”

She exhaled sharply through her nose in that frustrated way she did sometimes.

“I know.”

“This guy is kind of nuts so I really don’t have a clue what’s going to end up happening but-- I mean, half the things he says are…” Peter slowed down as half an idea formed somewhere at the back of his brain. “Um… Nonsense…”

“Peter?”

“Hold on, I’m-- almost a genius,” his words faltered. “A warm light for all mankind…”

“What does that mean?” Michelle asked, just as Peter figured it out. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself. “It means you need to call Pepper and get yourself out of New York as soon as possible.”

“No. You have to explain--”

“I don’t have time to explain,” Peter cut her off as he began racing down the corridor. “I just need you to trust me and I need you to get out of the city. Just-- fucking trust me, please, Em.”

“If we leave the city where are you gonna be?” she combatted him. “How are we gonna get to you when you get in over your head, huh?”

“I’m not alone on this one, I promise I’m not.”

“Peter, if you need us--”

“I need you to be safe,” he implored, pausing as a couple of Shield agents walked past him, lowering his voice. “I need to know you’re safe so I can handle this.”

“That’s not how this works--”

“I’m sorry,” he started moving again, within sight of the lab now, where he could see Tony was still with Bruce and Steve. “I’m so sorry, be as mad at me as you want, just get out of the fucking city, Em. I have to go-- Please, just do that.”

She was protesting as he hung up the phone and barreled into the lab with heavy breath and a racing heart.

“A warm light for all mankind,” he said, as everyone turned to face him, confusion and a hint of concern evident on their faces.

“What?” Tony asked.

“It’s what Loki just said to me-- A warm light for all mankind,” Peter explained, stepping closer to them, talking with his hands, more frantic than he had any right to be and all the right in the world to be.

“You went to see that guy?” Tony balked. “The highly dangerous prisoner I told you to stay away from?”

“He’s talking about the Tower, Tony,” Peter implored.

Realization passed over Bruce’s face. “Oh my God.”

“What about the Tower?” Steve asked. “Stark Tower?”

“Even if Barton didn’t tell Loki about the Tower,” Bruce said. “It was still all over the news.”

“Right,” Peter nodded urgently. “It’s powered by an arc reactor-- a self-sustaining energy source.”

Bruce looked to Tony. “That building will run itself for what, a year?”

“It’s just a prototype,” Tony shrugged, before looking to Steve. “I’m kinda the only name in clean energy right now, is the point.”

“Tony, stop,” Peter cut into the bragging and the banter, all sincerity and seriousness and anxiety.

“Alright, breathe,” Tony responded with surprising agreeability. “Say your piece.”

Peter took a step forward.

“One: Why is Loki pointing to the Tower specifically? What possible use does he have for it, or at the very least for showing us he knows about it?” Peter questioned. “And two: knowing that you’ve been working on this major advancement in energy sources, why wouldn’t Shield bring you in on the Tesseract project? Why wait until now?”

“All good questions, Padawan,” Tony nodded earnestly as he stepped around to a new monitor and tapped at it a couple of times. “Some of which we might get answers to once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of Shield’s secure files.”

Peter actually snorted at that, feeling some of the tension leave his body as he realized that what he had told Michelle was true-- he really wasn’t working alone on this one.

“Taking a page outta my book,” he quipped at the same time that Steve asked, “I’m sorry did you just say--”

“Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge,” Tony explained. “In a few hours I’ll know every dirty secret Shield has tried to hide.”

He directed that last bit vaguely in Peter’s direction with enough purpose that it felt like a personal offering. It said we’re going to find out why they make you nervous or we’re going to find a reason for you not to be without saying any of that at all, and Peter wondered when Tony had started trying to protect him. Had it been obvious all this time? Had Peter really missed that major a shift in their relationship?

“I don’t think there’s a question of why they didn’t want you around then, is there?” Steve asked.

Peter didn’t blame him for being skeptical of Tony, but he did kind of wish there was a way to painlessly explain to this man whose life up until that point had been all about serving those in power, that sometimes the people with the power shouldn’t have it in the first place.

“An intelligence organization that fears intelligence?” Tony lifted an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Peter backed him up without malice. “Historically not great.”

“What if Loki was just trying to wind you up?” Steve turned to Peter then. “He’s trying to start a war, so why not go to the youngest, most gullible link--”

“Dude, hey--”

“And hand him over a message that’ll drag us off our focus?” Steve finished over Peter’s weak protest.

“Okay,” Tony began, but Peter put up a hand and threw his shoulders back, banking on Spider-Man to take over for a moment.

“I know when I’m being played,” he told Steve. “I know you don’t know anything about me and you have no reason to trust me--”

“You know your file was the thinnest of all the information Shield gave me?” Steve asked rhetorically.

“Yeah, I do,” Peter laughed. “I work real hard to keep it that way, which I know makes me something of a wild card to you, but Tony trusts me. And Nat trusts me. And, hell, Fury trusts me enough that he came to talk to me about the damn Avengers Initiative three years ago when you were still getting freezer burn somewhere… I know when I’m being played. That’s not what this is.”

If Captain America had ever looked properly cowed in his life, Peter thought that this was probably at least halfway to that.

“Steve,” Bruce spoke up quietly. “Tell me none of this smells funky to you.”

A beat, a moment, a breath.

“Just find the Cube.”

And Steve walked out.

***

Natasha wasn’t sure if she should thank Peter for throwing Loki off his game just enough for her plan to be working, or whether encouraging that kind of behavior would just end up biting her in the ass eventually, but for the moment she was just grateful that his propensity to sneak around was working in her favor rather than against her.

“Can you wipe out that much red?” Loki asked her, and it hit her somewhere real even if everything she was giving him in the moment was fake.

“Your ledger is gushing red,” he said to her. “And you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything?” and still she pretended with all the honesty in her heart.

He told her that he would make Clint kill her-- slowly and intimately and in all the ways he knew she most feared-- and her tears were fake but the heaviness in her lungs was real.

But then Loki told her his play, his angle with the Hulk, and she pushed it all aside, the real and fake alike, to do her job.

***

They had the model running, searching as fast as it could for the Cube, and they knew that once it pinged they’d have the location within a half a mile.

In the meantime, Tony was doing a little bit of digging into the work that Jarvis had so kindly done for him, and found a lot of little doorways to which his access was denied within Shield’s records.

“Why can’t you get over here and do your little hacker-man job like you did on my server?” he asked Peter, who really did always manage to sit somewhere improbably. This time, hanging from the ceiling by a single strand of web.

(This had freaked Bruce out for all of ten seconds before his curiosity got the better of him and he started asking about the web formula.)

“Because that was mostly-- Well-- Y’know,” Peter shrugged, still upside down.

“Right,” Tony deadpanned. “The friend that also very easily hacked into Rhodey’s suit. Don’t let him get too seriously wronged by anyone or we’ll have a supervillain on our hands.”

Peter snorted. “Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that too much.”

***

When Fury stormed into the lab ten minutes later, demanding to know what Tony was up to and what he was looking for, Peter flipped to the ground with ease and seemed to visibly put his guard back up.

Tony took the brunt of the reprimanding, because he was used to it and it didn’t particularly bother him, and then something called Phase Two popped up on his decryption search, and he had a whole new direction to take the conversation in.

“What is Phase Two, Director?”

“Phase Two is Shield using the Cube to build weapons.” Steve Rogers, out of the blue and punctuating his statement by dropping one such weapon onto a nearby countertop.

Peter stared at the assault rifle on the counter for a beat and then laughed with a bitterness Tony hadn’t known he even had the capacity for, turning around and walking a few feet further away from the group. If it had been anyone else, with that amount of tension in their shoulders and that amount of potential energy at all times, Tony thought he might’ve hit something, shattered some glass just to work it out of his system.

But this was Peter Parker, and even with his abilities, violence was a last resort.

“Rogers,” Fury stepped towards him, ignoring Peter’s almost-an-outburst. “We gathered everything related to the Tesseract. That does not mean that we’re making--”

“I’m sorry,” Tony flipped his screen around to face the room at large. “Nick, what were you lying?”

Peter turned back around then, spider eyes squinting at the specs for a missile that Tony had pulled up in front of them.

“Fuck me,” the kid muttered, arms crossed tight enough that it had to hurt. “I can’t believe you made me fucking come here,” he said to Tony.

“Were we not getting past that?”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty indiscriminately mad right now to tell you the truth, Tony,” Peter snapped.

“Sure, but mostly at him, right?” Tony motioned to Fury with a nod of his head.

Peter shot him what he was sure was probably a withering look as Thor and Natasha stepped into the room side-by-side, bringing the group back together for the first time since their little conference earlier in the day.

“Did you know about this?” Steve asked Natasha, who only had eyes for Bruce.

It was moving fast enough that Tony was actually needing to pay attention, rather than catching the gist of everything as it floated by like he usually did in conversations.

“Doctor Banner,” Natasha ignored Steve’s question, which Tony could feel made Peter bristle a little extra. “Do you want to maybe remove yourself from this environment?”

Bruce laughed. “I was in Calcutta,” he said. “I was pretty well removed.”

“Loki is manipulating you.”

“From three floors down in a glass cage?” Peter snarked. “While, what, all of you up here have been completely forthcoming with us?”

“Webs...” Tony said, making note of the fact that he was the one with a warning tone for once rather than living on the other side of it.

“No,” Peter stepped threateningly toward Natasha, which surprised everyone in the room. Visibly and alarmingly. “I wanna know why Shield is using the Tesseract to build weapons of mass destruction. And I wanna know if those things I built last year are still in a vault here somewhere, Nat!”

“Lower your voice,” Natasha said evenly.

“Because you told me they had all been destroyed!” Peter continued, caught in something that none of them would really ever understand, although maybe Tony was the closest. “You told me, to my face, that not even the specs were saved so they could never be recreated, but--”

“Get out of my face, Spider-Man,” Natasha cut him off and Peter snapped his teeth together, breathing heavily through his nose as he took a step back.

“I’m not kidding around about this,” he said, low and real and very nearly menacing.

“Neither are we,” Fury said. “Spider-Man, I’ll forgive you for not understanding this what with how you like to stick to your neighborhood and all, but we need weapons like these because of people like him.”

Fury pointed at Thor, whose surprise was almost comical in its disbelief.

“A visitor from another planet has a grudge match that levels a small town,” Fury continued. “And we don’t have any way to protect ourselves? We are not alone, and we are hopelessly outgunned.”

“My people want nothing but peace with your planet,” Thor beseeched.

“But you’re not the only people out there, are you?” Fury responded pointedly.

Soon enough, and with very little fanning to the already burning flame between these people-- these strangers working for a like cause for such varying reasons and from such varying backgrounds-- they were all talking over each other. Tony included of course, as he defended himself, as he fought back against opinions of him that were correct and wrong all in the same breath.

It was overwhelming, and they should have seen the barriers between them coming, but hadn’t that been why the Avengers plan had been scrapped in the first place? Hadn’t this been the reason Tony had been barred from it in the first place?

He was volatile. He didn’t play well with others. When someone was able to piss off Peter Parker of all people-- because he could already tell the kid was probably the best of them, the most worthy of any sort of power in this world-- Tony was going to get as loud as he needed to be heard.

And he did, and he did, and he did, until--

“Doctor Banner.”

Peter’s voice, sounding more his age than he had all day and making them all realize what had happened without their notice, because they’d been too caught up in the one-up-manship.

“Put down the scepter,” Peter suggested gently, and it seemed as though even Bruce hadn’t noticed that it was in his hand, glowing bright as the day was long (that day in particular).

There was just the sound of their collective deep breathing for a few endless seconds as Bruce carefully placed the scepter back on its stand, and the silence may never have been broken if it hadn’t been for the alert that beeped from one of the monitors across the room.

“That’s the Tesseract,” Bruce strode towards it as everyone else continued to bicker about who would retrieve it, where it would go.

Peter followed Bruce, looking at the monitor over his shoulder, and Tony saw the moment the lenses of his eyes got bigger and matched the gobsmacked expression on Bruce’s face.

“Oh my God…”

And then, as though it had been waiting for its cue…

Boom.

The floor fell out, the glass walls shattered, and the whole world, up in the sky, turned inside out.

Chapter Text

Peter’s senses were ringing.

All of them, not just his ears, but all of it-- blown out by an explosion so large it had shaken the entire helicarrier where it stood in the sky. It had been a while since Peter had experienced a sensory overload of this sort, where his enhanced senses got knocked a little too hard and it made everything too loud and hot and smelly and bright and too, too much for him to be able to comprehend anything beyond his physical presence on this plane of reality.

Which was why it wasn’t great that someone was shoving at his shoulder. Again and again and again with the shoving as Peter curled up on himself and pressed the palms of his hands over his ears.

“-der-Man!” Natasha’s voice began to cut through the ringing, but still made him groan with discomfort. “Spider-Man! Hey, Spidey, I know it hurts but you gotta push through it, now!”

“Fuck,” he mumbled, keeping his eyes closed but pushing himself up on his hands and knees.

“There you go,” she encouraged. “Come on, we’ve got a situation brewing here and I need your help.”

He pulled his mask up to free his nose and mouth, taking in gulping breaths of air as he tried to settle his stomach.

“I’m fine,” he said, trying to convince both of them as he squinted his eyes open slowly and swayed, almost toppling over. “I’m fine.”

“You are fine,” Natasha reiterated. “Push through it and then look at me.”

Peter forced his eyes open enough to realize they’d fallen through the floor of the lab, into some engine room or storage type situation beneath the bulk of the populated parts of the helicarrier. Metal grating pressed into his kneecaps and fluorescent tube lights lined the maintenance access points and as Peter stood up he noticed two very important things.

One: Natasha’s leg was stuck under a large metal support beam and, two: Doctor Banner was on the floor, much in the same position that Peter had been with his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, face down and holding back groans of effort through his teeth as though trying to stave something off.

“Shit,” Peter said as he pulled his mask back down.

“Yeah,” Natasha breathed. “That’s the situation we’re dealing with. Wanna help me out from here?”

“Yeah, move when I say,” Peter pulled his eyes away from Bruce, deciding to deal with one thing at a time, and grabbed the beam with both hands, lifting with relative ease as he pressed the soles of his feet into the floor. “Now.”

Natasha rolled out of the way and Peter gently replaced the beam where it was, not wanting to shift anything else that might get in their way.

“If he changes we’re screwed,” Natasha said, shaking out her leg as she stood up, seeming to take stock of the damage.

“You guys really only have the one containment unit?”

“To be fair,” she shot him a look. “Only one Hulk.”

“Sure but, like, would’ve killed you to have two?” Peter rubbed at his forehead, still not entirely steady on his own feet.

“You wanna talk about this or you wanna solve the problem, Parker?”

Peter took a deep breath and he let it out slowly.

“Alright, let’s do this.”

***

One of the engines was down and if they didn’t fix it they were going to definitely blow the whole Shield secret helicarrier thing by diving straight into a neighborhood somewhere in Jersey.

Tony, suited up and reminding himself regularly that Peter could fight his own battles, was more than willing to help fix the problem at hand. What he wasn’t quite sure of was why he’d been paired up with Steve-- a man who Tony was convinced wouldn’t have been able to fix a car in his own era let alone the engine of a helicarrier in theirs.

Nonetheless, there was fixing to do, and so Tony was going to find a way to do it. Whether he liked his assigned partner or not.

***

“Doc?” Peter crouched down beside Bruce, speaking as soothingly and quietly as he could while still being heard. “Doctor Banner, you gotta fight it.”

“This is just what Loki wants,” Natasha added. They were both doing a pretty good job of keeping level heads if he did say so himself, although he couldn’t promise that would continue if this problem went the way Bruce’s green-tinged fingers clearly wanted it to go.

“What do we do if this doesn’t work?” Peter asked over his shoulder to where Natasha was standing. “I have super strength but not Hulk super strength.”

“How strong are your webs?” she asked.

“Never tested them on gamma giants before, believe it or not,” Peter deadpanned, but Bruce wasn’t responding to anything they were doing and his hope was fading very, very quickly.

“Bruce, breathe,” Natasha tried helplessly. “We’re gonna be okay, just hold on, okay?”

“Nat…”

“No, he can do it,” she insisted.

“Let’s just take a step back,” Peter stood up and put one arm out in front of him, two fingers resting gently on the trigger for his web shooter, because his danger sense was screaming at him.

“Bruce,” Natasha continued to speak even as he pushed her away from the man in visible pain on the floor. “Bruce, I swear-- You’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna get you out of this, I swear--”

Bruce cut her off with an inhuman growl, his whole body flashing green and his arms and chest straining against the fabric of his shirt.

“Different plan, now, Nat,” Peter insisted, shooting a few webs at Bruce’s feet but knowing they weren’t going to hold.

A slow step backwards; Bruce’s shirt began to rip.

A deep, trembling breath; a flash of green turned solid.

The creak of metal beneath their feet; rippling muscle and scared, human eyes.

The Hulk roared.

And they ran.

***

There was debris in the rotors that Tony wasn’t going to be able to remove until he had the superconducting coolant system back online and when he sent Steve to the engine control panel to find out which relays were in the overload position, he realized this whole thing would be a lot easier with the help of someone who had, say, worked with him in a lab before and knew what all those words meant.

“What does it look like in there?”

“It seems to run on some form of electricity,” Steve snarked self-deprecatingly.

It almost made Tony laugh.

“Well,” he responded. “You’re not wrong.”

***

One thing that Peter and Natasha had in common when it came to their special skills was the ability to slip quietly around without being seen or heard.

They found their way to behind a large, metal shelving unit, ducking down low as Peter tuned his still-ringing ears into the Hulk’s movements as much as he could.

“I have to get closer,” he whispered, earning a fierce look from Natasha.

“No.”

“I might be able to slow him down enough to keep him from doing too much damage before Bruce can get back in control,” Peter insisted with more confidence in that plan than he felt. “And in the meantime, you can go upstairs and find-- I dunno-- did you guys make any Hulk tranquilizers when you built that fucking death trap?”

“Not the time for your moral indignation,” Natasha fired back before she relented. “But-- yeah, I think there’s an untested version in a vault upstairs.”

“Alright,” Peter nodded, already climbing the shelving unit and using his leverage to hop onto the ceiling. “The minute you have an opening-- run.”

“Peter,” she hissed.

“See you in a minute--”

“Peter--”

But he was already crawling towards Hulk’s looming, searching form, and then past him, and then dropping down on the opposite side from Natasha’s escape route.

“Hey, Doc,” he said as he landed lithely on his feet, immediately shooting two quick webs at his feet. “Still feeling angry?”

Hulk dropped his fists to the ground, cracking the cement as he let out a screaming growl of a sound straight at Peter.

“Cool, that’s fine, all good,” Peter put his hands up and took slow steps backwards. “It’s nice to meet you, by the way-- I’ve read a lot about you.”

He was trying to keep his voice level and casual, pretending that he was just having a conversation with a regular guy instead of a giant that could crush his skull with two fingers if he wanted to. Because Peter knew Bruce didn’t want to, and Bruce was still in there somewhere.

“Hey, can you and the Doc talk to each other?” he asked, genuinely curious. “Could you pass a message on for me?”

“BANNER NOT HERE!” Hulk yelled, shocking Peter back a few more quick steps, making his heart stutter in his chest. “BANNER NOT LISTEN! BANNER TRY TO KILL HULK!”

“Okay, a bit of resentment there, that’s fair,” Peter said as Hulk pulled at the webs on his feet, only requiring a couple of tugs before they came loose and he was free to charge if he wanted.

He was kind of looking like he wanted.

“But, we might be able to talk to him together?” Peter suggested. “Have a little intervention of sorts between friends--”

“BANNER! NOT! FRIEND!”

Peter spun on his heel and took a running leap into a swing in the opposite direction at the same time that Hulk charged forward towards him, taking down shelves and busting open steam pipes and shattering glass cabinets and windows.

Now, Peter had been caught up in a number of high-speed chases in his day, both as the chaser and as the runner, but he had certainly never done so with a being quite as fast and strong and indestructible as Hulk. If he had had the space for thoughts outside of escape and protect and survive he would have realized that he hadn’t been quite so afraid for his life before.

He was moving fast-- faster than he knew he could-- and he could feel shards of glass as the Hulk destroyed everything around them, in his face and arms and back. The ringing in his ears was constant and fucking with his equillibrium and made his aim embarrassingly off when he tried to twist around and web Hulk’s hands to his own body, his legs to the floor, his shoulders to the ceiling.

If he had been more on his game, he might have been able to work fast enough to at least slow Hulk down, but as it was, and with missing as much as he was, the web wasn’t building up fast enough to resist the unmatched strength of the giant.

So Peter kept moving, and moving, and moving until inevitably he hit a--

Dead end.

Peter, although he had been trying to keep Hulk in the lower levels where there were fewer people to get potentially hurt, had to either go up the stairs (and thus lead Hulk upstairs) or become a spider-shaped grease stain on the upcoming concrete wall.

He went up.

No plan to speak of and hoping that Natasha was at the very least safe and ideally finding something they could use to knock out the rampaging Hulk, Peter pulled himself to the top of the stairs, Hulk closer on his heels than ever before, and he thought he might be about to get smacked around a little bit when out of nowhere-- a god.

“We are not your enemies, Banner!” Thor exclaimed upon tackling Hulk through a glass wall and into some sort of atrium that looked out over the clouds.

Thor’s grappling with Hulk gave Peter a few seconds to catch his breath and to tap at his ears, testing out any sort of progress on that end and finding that if there was any it was awfully small.

Even being a god and with the whole magic hammer thing going for him, Thor still struggled to hold his own against Hulk, so Peter shook out his sore limbs and rushed into the fray, only to be immediately betrayed by his fried senses and fail to dodge a backhand from a set of knuckles the length of his torso.

Peter went flying and slammed back into a wall, knocking the breath out of his lungs and leaving him gasping while Thor continued to try and incapacitate Hulk with logical words and fists alike.

He wasn’t sure who had ordered a fighter jet to show up and start shooting, but as Peter ducked behind his arms and huddled his body away from the raining bullets (that were just bouncing off of the Hulk for the record), he decided he was going to have a good, long conversation with them when this was all over.

Peter stumbled to his feet as the gunfire stopped and watched as the Hulk tackled the fucking fighter jet like a wolf pounces on a meal. He hurried to the edge of the floor, where they were now exposed to the whipping wind of the high altitude and tried to fire two webs to hold the jet in place.

But it was falling into a dive, and even with his sticky feet, Peter was going to either be pulled off the ledge or have his arms pulled out of socket, so he had to let go and watch it burn, watch the Hulk fall through the clouds and toward the Earth.

“Fuck,” he exclaimed, punching the wall and leaving a dent. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

He could still hear that damn explosion in the stupid ringing of his stupid ears and it was throwing everything off track. Peter was so used to being naturally balanced and relying so heavily on his senses to get through a fight, but it was like trying to sprint underwater without all of that and now Bruce was suffering the consequences of his incompetence.

“Young spider,” Thor called out from the other side of the room. “There is more work to be done yet.”

And honestly Thor could go fuck himself for cutting off Peter’s temper tantrum, but he was also very, very right so Peter took a deep breath and let it out all in one huff.

“Alright,” he said. “Alright, let’s go.”

***

Tony not only had to get in the turbine and push to start it, but he had to rely on a preoccupied Steve mid-firefight to be able to pull the lever to slow it down so he could get out before he got torn to shreds.

So, a pretty regular day all around but he figured he was due a trip to the beach after this anyway.

“Stark, we’re losing altitude,” Fury said in his ear as Tony began to push.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I noticed.”

Metal screeched against metal as he got it moving and sparks flew as he increased his speed and he really fucking hoped that this was going to work.

For all of their sakes.

***

Thor had gone off in search of his brother and Peter had heard over a comm unit he’d stolen off a desk somewhere that Natasha was going after Barton, so Peter was just sort of running and hoping he found a way to help somewhere along the line.

He was running, running, running, but he skidded to a stop as he came across Agent Coulson, unlocking some sort of high-security vault by the looks of it, considering it had both a fingerprint and retina scanner.

“Where’s Tony?” he asked.

“Tony’s handling the engine shutdown,” Coulson told him simply. “You’ll be more helpful with me. We have a few visitors.”

“Were we infiltrated?” he asked, panting as Coulson unlocked the door.

“Loki’s cell has been breached,” Coulson responded. “Not sure what we’re walking into, but I’m going there now.”

“Shit, okay,” Peter shook his hands out. “That’s where Thor was just headed-- What the hell is that?”

Coulson hefted a comically large gun in both hands, weighed it there for a moment with a contemplative look on his face.

“You know, I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “But it can’t hurt to have it, huh?”

***

Faster, faster, faster--

“Cap, hit the lever.”

“I need a minute here!”

“Lever,” Tony began to panic, feeling himself stop pushing the rotor so much as being pulled by it. “Now!”

It felt like he was stuck there for hours but was in reality only a few seconds, about to be pulled under and torn to pieces right when the rotor slowed just enough for him to push himself out of the danger zone and find his balance on his repulsors once more.

He forced his way back in through a hole in the side of the helicarrier, stumbled the landing and fell flat on his back, breathing heavily as he tried to get his heart rate back to a normal level.

***

Halfway to the containment unit, Peter and Coulson had to split up so Peter could hold back a group of infiltrators. He knocked them out and webbed them up nice and tight so they wouldn’t be escaping any time soon and then sprinted after Coulson in one of those moments when his spidey sense was working in absolute overtime.

He had no idea how, but he knew that Loki was out of his cage, and he knew that that wasn’t going to be good for any of them.

Peter used a web to fling himself around a corner, feeling the muscles in his side pulling uncomfortably, painfully, probably torn in his altercation with Hulk that was still weighing on his shoulders and somehow fading into the distant past at the same time.

This was all so far above his pay grade, he didn’t belong here, he didn’t know how to help, he couldn’t fix it, fix it, fix it.

He turned the corner into the containment unit just in time to watch Loki bring his blade up through Coulson’s back.

And directly through his heart.

Something inside of Peter froze in that moment, slowing his usually quick reflexes to a point of nonexistence as he watched Coulson collapse against the wall, heard Thor exclaim a pained dissent from inside the supposedly invincible cage, and saw Loki wink before seeming to disappear into thin air.

But the way it all played out, it felt like Peter was viewing it from outside his own body, and that sensation was so old and so familiar that it sent his brain somewhere that he had pushed down, pushed away again and again and again until it was a faint nightmare rather than the technicolor torture that was pressing down on him now.

A bright, projected image playing over reality of a man, shot outside a bodega while his fourteen year old nephew watched, frozen and unable to save him.

Peter’s breathing was coming too fast (both then and now), which was something he would have noticed if he had been here rather than there and his hands were trembling as he fell to his knees beside Coulson, blood blooming bright across his chest.

“Fuck. No,” Peter’s voice was choked and garbled by unresolved trauma and grief. “No, no, no, you’re okay-- You’re gonna be fine.”

He pressed his hands into the wound uselessly. Pressed, pressed, pressed his hands into the wound as the blood soaked the concrete of the sidewalk, the metal grating, the fabric of an old Mets sweatshirt.

“Spider-Man,” that was Thor behind him, and Peter wasn’t sure how long he had been talking before he actually started to hear him. “You have to let me out-- Let me out so I can help--”

But Peter couldn’t move his hands. He had to press down and stop the bleeding-- if he could only just stop the bleeding--

“You’re going to do good,” Coulson said through labored breathing and with blood on his teeth.

“You’re gonna live,” Peter responded fiercely despite the fact that he was definitely crying. “This time you’re gonna-- you’re gonna live--”

He couldn’t breathe. Peter couldn’t breathe and so without really thinking about it he reached up with one bloody glove and pulled his mask off, dropping it beside where his knees dug into the metal grating below them.

“It’s in your nature,” Coulson said with a wet, ragged cough. “The goodness.”

You have such a good heart, Peter.

“Stop it,” Peter sobbed. “Stop it--”

Such a good heart, Pete. Use it.

There was a neon OPEN sign and a rack of scratch offs next to a holoscreen that controlled the cage for a superhuman giant and he wasn’t Spider-Man as he pressed his blood-soaked hands into Coulson’s chest, he was just Peter Parker, trying to breathe, trying not to live through this all over again.

Fury appeared out of nowhere then, trying to get Peter out of the way so he could assess the damage, but Peter wasn’t budging-- couldn’t move with the weight of Ben Parker resting on his narrow shoulders.

“Spider-Man-- Hey-- Parker--”

“We have to stop the bleeding, we have to stop--”

“I know, I’m working on it-- Thor, could you--”

And Fury must have released Thor from the cage at some point because then thick, strong arms were wrapping around his chest and pulling him away even as he lashed out and kicked and smeared blood all over Thor’s arms and clothes and cape.

Fury was talking to Coulson, and Coulson was dying, and Thor was dragging Peter out of the room and bodily pushing him to sit down against the wall in the corridor outside.

“Young spider,” he began, voice deep and steady and very nearly soothing. “You fought valiantly, but now you must recuperate. Take a breath.”

Thor placed a strong hand on Peter’s shoulder and squeezed, and it at the very least made him aware that he was having a panic attack. Maybe that was all that needed to happen to snap him out of it though, because although not for some time and not all that frequently, Peter had had his fair share of anxiety episodes after Ben’s death, and he knew how to pull himself out of those.

“Yeah, shit, get a grip Peter,” he murmured to himself, fingers lacing together behind his neck and pressing his head down into his knees. “Get a grip-- Get a grip, Spider-Man.”

Thor’s hand remained on his shoulder as he steadied his breathing and, ironically enough, as the ringing in his ears started to ease out. Peter let his weight fall back into the wall behind him, tipped his head so the back of his skull pressed into the hard surface, and breathed.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

“Thanks,” he said quietly, and Thor removed his hand with a nod. “Do you-- Uh, know what I did with my mask?”

Thor pulled it out of a pocket on his belt and offered it to Peter. “I made sure to get it on the way out.”

Slowly, and with unsteady hands, Peter took the mask and ran his thumbs over it. His thumbs, which were still stained dark with half-dried blood, running across the webbing of his mask with fear and reverence and guilt.

The very thing that made him panic enough to take it off was also the thing that had made him put it on for the first time, and the mirroring of those two things was not lost on Peter. Neither was the fact that he was very much making the death of an agent, a man, another good man on his watch, beneath his hands, all about himself. That was where the guilt came in, after all, the knowledge that every death he would ever witness would bring him back to that very first one, the most personal and life shaking and unfair of them all.

There were a lot of ways that he carried Ben Parker with him, but this was the only one he would willingly give up.

Peter looked up and met Thor’s gaze, knowing how young he looked, how inexperienced, how unworthy for battle he must seem in the eyes of this man now that he had seen him like this.

But Thor met his eye certainly, and then he said, “I did not see anything,” and Peter clenched down on his jaw to keep it from trembling with overwhelming emotion.

Peter nodded his thanks because he didn’t trust his voice and then slipped his mask back on over his head because he could hear properly again without all the ringing, and that meant knowing that someone was about to turn the corner and see them.

“Kid?”

Thor stood upon Tony’s hurried arrival, steps getting faster the closer he got, but Peter stayed sitting where he was because he wasn’t fully convinced his legs were ready to hold his weight again yet.

“Kid-- Are you-- Is that your blood?” Tony crouched down in front of him, sans-suit but a little mussed up with dirt and sweat across his face and hair.

“Coulson’s,” Peter assured him, but Tony was pulling at a shard of glass that had gotten stuck in his bicep.

“Some of it's yours,” he flicked the glass to the side as he gave Peter a once-over.

“I am going to check on the others,” Thor told them, sharing a respectful nod of understanding with Peter before walking away and leaving the two of them alone in the hallway.

Peter slumped further against the wall once he was gone, a heaviness setting into his bones that was a regular friend of his grief-- one rarely showed up without the other. He closed his eyes, took a breath, clasped his trembling hands together.

“They called it?” he asked. “He’s gone?”

“Yes,” Tony replied with the simplicity that accompanied tragedy.

Peter lifted his head and let it thud back against the wall with more force than was necessary, because he was going a little numb around the edges and he needed a reminder that it was real so he could stay in this tragedy instead of stumbling sideways, backwards into a different one.

“I was too slow,” he said.

“Jesus,” Tony shook his head with a sigh as he moved to sit up against the wall beside Peter. “Don’t do that.”

“Okay,” Peter exhaled.

And in some silent, mutual agreement, they decided that now wasn’t the time to talk about it, that any words that needed to be said could wait. So they sat up against that wall, and Peter felt the raw, wet clay of his grief molding itself into hot anger that had nowhere to go except out.

He was going to blow up with the pressure of it, eventually.

He knew what direction he wanted to be pointed in when he did.

Chapter Text

Tony had never seen Peter Parker go quiet before.

And this wasn’t to say that he had only ever seen the rambling, enthusiastic, energetic face that he put on for a good show, because that wasn’t true either. Tony had seen the kid get frustrated plenty, he had seen him angry even, and sad.

But there was something about this, sitting back at the bridge of a half-dead helicarrier and watching Peter be frighteningly still, concerningly quiet, maddeningly tense that was different. And Tony had to say, he wasn’t really a fan.

There was a reason for Peter’s shift in attitude, and in between the time it had taken to make sure the helicarrier was running as close to normal as possible and get everyone still onboard back in one room, Tony had found that reason on the security tapes. Because he was curious and Jarvis was an enabler, but also because he was, quite frankly, worried.

Over a year ago now, Tony had done a deep-dive search into everything there was to know about one Peter Parker. It hadn’t covered everything, and he knew that now, but it had covered the sudden and violent death of one Ben Parker.

As it turned out, Tony wasn’t the only one with lingering hang-ups from the loss of his family.

Tony didn’t like to be handed things.

Peter Parker didn’t like guns.

And why it took Coulson dying and the kid having what was definitely some sort of flashback-induced panic attack for Tony to understand this he wasn’t sure, but it made the whole anxiety surrounding Shield, what they had asked of him with the Hammer situation, why he had blown up in Natasha’s face earlier in the day-- it made it all make sense.

Peter Parker was a traumatized twenty-year-old and Tony had dragged him right back into a situation to exacerbate all of it.

So, maybe he was being a bit quiet at that table too.

“We’re dead in the air up here,” Fury said, standing while everyone else sat like some sort of pissed-off school teacher reprimanding his students. “Our communications, the location of the Cube, Banner--”

Peter’s head dipped so his chin was almost resting on his chest.

“--I’ve got nothing for you,” Fury finished.

Quiet. A viscous sort of quiet. The kind of quiet that made time move slower and made the breath in their lungs feel thicker, as though they might choke on it. Drown in it.

“Yes,” Fury continued, because who else was going to talk in that moment. “We were going to use the Tesseract to build an arsenal, but I never put all my chips on that number because I was playing something riskier.”

Tony forced the soles of his shoes into the ground, his gaze not much above where the two surfaces met.

“There was an idea,” Fury said. “Some of you know about this already-- the Avengers Initiative. The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to. To fight the battles that we never could.”

“And you thought that would turn out any different than this?” Peter spoke up, jarring all of them and, seemingly, even himself before he continued. “That you’d put a bunch of strangers in a room and that we’d be fast friends?”

“I don’t care if you’re friends,” Fury responded just as fiercely as Peter. “I care that you save us from what’s coming.”

“So a team then,” Peter shrugged. “You wanted a team. But how is Captain America--” he pointed at Steve, “supposed to trust me when all he knows about human enhancements comes from Nazi human experimentation?”

Tony saw Steve clench his jaw, but Peter just kept going.

“And how was Doctor Banner supposed to trust Shield when it’s just another military intelligence organization just like the ones he’s been running from for years?” he questioned, fire in his words growing hotter with every syllable. “How is Thor supposed to trust any of us, really? An Asgardian who’s never seen war on this planet before? Who’s trying to save his brother from himself while we’re trying to, what, fucking kill him?”

“Spider-Man--”

“No, listen,” Peter stood up abruptly, chair scraping against the floor as he pressed the palms of his hands into the table. “I’m gonna feel guilty about what happened here today for the rest of my goddamn life. But you should too, Director.”

“Phil Coulson died believing in the idea of the Avengers,” Fury pressed. “In the idea that you could be heroes.”

Peter pushed himself upright, shoulders back as he leveled Fury with a gaze that Tony knew in his heart was fierce behind the mask-- fiercer than he had ever seen on Peter Parker’s face before.

If any of them were truly remarkable, Tony thought, it was Peter. In that moment, yes, but always. In the way that he carried himself through life, in the way he dedicated himself to the people he loved and the people of his neighborhood in equal measure.

Tony had no doubt that if he thought he could do it, Peter would treat the whole world as his neighborhood, but that days like this held him back. The days when he lost something, someone, to the inevitability of catastrophe.

Peter didn’t say anything before he turned and walked away, and Tony didn’t either in the few seconds he waited before following him.

***

At the start of the day, Natasha had had one primary goal.

She was going to get Clint back from the monster that had taken him, and she was going to do whatever it took to do that. She was going to bring in everyone, she was going to fight tooth and nail, she was going to lay herself down on the wire if that was what it took to get him back and safe and home.

But now that she had done that, she knew she wasn’t done yet. She couldn’t be.

“Phil is dead,” she told Clint where he was sitting up on a medbay bed and nursing one hell of a headache with a glass of water.

“Loki?” Clint asked, heartbreak in his eyes but that same strength in his shoulders as always. Natasha just nodded once, watched him exhale slowly. “He got away?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t suppose you know where he went?”

“I didn’t need to know,” Clint said, self-deprecation in the shake of his head. “Didn’t even think to ask.”

Natasha stood up from where she was sitting beside him, paced to the other side of the room with her arms crossed so she could lean against the wall.

“He’s gonna make his play soon though,” Clint continued, visibly grasping for some way to help, to push past whatever misplaced guilt he had hanging around his neck. “Today.”

“We have to stop him,” Natasha said, joints all tight, muscles tense and ready for action the moment she knew what that action needed to be.

“You and me?” Clint raised an eyebrow.

“Whoever’s left,” Natasha shrugged. “I have a pretty good feeling though that if New York is in trouble, Spider-Man will be there.”

No matter how pissed he was at her, he’d always be there for his people.

Clint looked at her knowingly. “The new guy?” he asked. “You’re not getting attached, are you?”

“And Stark looks out for the kid,” she ignored the jab. “Whether he admits to it or not-- if Spidey’s with us so is he.”

“Well, that’s something,” Clint let the teasing go, heaviness overtaking him once more. “Plus, I’d feel a lot better if I could put an arrow through Loki’s eye.”

“That sounds more like you,” she smiled at him-- a little thing, just touching the edges of her countenance.

“And you’re sounding less like you,” he replied, not maliciously so. “Putting together a team, rather than handling a problem with your own two hands. What happened, Nat?”

She thought about it for a moment, tried to find an answer for him, but the only thing playing on repeat in her mind was Peter Parker-- distracting a threat so she could get away, forming a plan that required the both of them, freeing her leg when he was still unsteady on his own and saying let’s do this before either of them knew what this was.

“A lot.”

***

Peter was back in the containment unit when Tony found him.

He sat up on the rail with his mask in his hands, perched with his feet stuck to the lower bar and staring at the place where Coulson had died. There were still stray bandages from the attempt the medical team had made, blood on the floor and on the wall that had yet to be cleaned up, and Peter was gripping the railing with just enough force that the metal creaked but didn’t bend.

When Tony walked in he didn’t look up, just kept staring and staring and staring until his vision blurred and it became less like reality and more like an endless bad dream.

“It’s not your fault,” Tony cut into his attempt at dissociating from his own life as he leaned up against the rail right next to where Peter was sitting. “I’m sure somewhere in that big ‘ole brain of yours you know that, but-- bears saying out loud.”

“You weren’t here,” Peter’s voice broke, not because he was crying but because he was breaking.

“Neither were you,” Tony pointed out without a hint of malice, just honesty. “You walked in to see a guy getting stabbed. That’s not on you.”

“I was on my way,” Peter shook his head. “If I had been faster--”

“But you weren’t,” Tony cut him off. “You weren’t and he died and that’s not on you. All of that can be true at the same time.”

Peter was quiet, not knowing how to respond to that without just furthering the same argument, taking them in circles again and again and again until they were both sick of their own voices.

Tony sighed.

“You’ve got too big a guilt complex for how new you are,” he said, something like dejection in his tone.

“I’m not that new,” Peter reminded him. “Been doing this longer than you.”

“I don’t mean new at-- this,” he motioned awkwardly with his hands in front of him. “I mean new… Pete. You’re twenty years old, you’re barely a person yet, but you’ve got enough unearned guilt to bury the Empire State Building.”

“You don’t get it.”

“The first thing I did as Iron Man was fail to save someone who deserved none of what life threw at him,” Tony said sharply but not quite cruelly. It forced Peter to turn his gaze to look him in the eye, to see a carefully guarded sincerity that he knew he should feel lucky to get to experience.

“How do you live with it, then?” Peter asked quietly. “Because every time I think I’ve figured it out, it just happens all over again. It just-- won’t stop happening.”

It was his parents and it was Ben and it was the woman who handed him her baby in the middle of an apartment fire because he only had time to get one of them out before it collapsed.

It was Phil Coulson and it was all of them all at once.

Tony seemed to understand this, or at least to recognize it, as he took a deep breath.

“I think,” he said. “You have to stop making part of your process to acceptance any sort of promise that it won’t happen again.”

Peter looked down to the mask in his hands, the white eyes staring back up at him.

“You could go home, you know,” Tony told him. “This thing’s busted to hell and we’re gonna have to land soon anyway. You can leave.”

“No, I can’t,” Peter said with zero hesitation.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Peter took a breath, he frowned, he clenched his hands tighter around the fabric in his hands. “When you’ve got the power to help solve a problem, you also have the responsibility to try and solve it, Tony.”

Peter wasn’t sure what, but something in that statement put a deep crack in Tony’s walls, opened up a soft spot right in the wrinkle between his eyes.

“Alright,” he said. “So we try.”

***

Tony went looking for Steve almost immediately following his conversation with Peter. The kid had wanted a minute and Tony was more than happy to give it to him, even if he wasn’t entirely convinced that the minute Peter desired was less for getting himself grounded and more for tracking down answers to whatever questions were still poking at him.

But if Peter had proven anything it was that he had a gut worth trusting, and so Tony took it upon himself to try and be worth anything in return.

He found Steve in the remnants of what had previously been a lab, leaning against one wall and letting his heavy gaze fall to the hole blown in the floor. Tony kept his distance, leaned in the doorway for a moment without speaking up.

“How’s the kid?” Steve asked, arms crossed and keeping his gaze downwards.

“He’ll be fine,” Tony replied simply. “Better than the rest of us, quite frankly.”

Steve breathed out a quiet chuckle. “Yeah,” he agreed, because at least that was something they could agree on.

There was a beat, because neither of them really knew what the right thing to say was, but eventually Steve broke the silence again.

“Coulson seemed like a good man,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Tony snorted. “He was an idiot.”

Steve’s gaze shot up. “Why? For believing?”

“For going after Loki alone,” Tony explained.

“He thought we had his back.”

“Because we’re a team?” Tony snapped. “Spider-Man was right, you know. You don’t get a team by putting a bunch of individuals in the same room. A group of people doesn’t make a fucking team.”

“You’re angry,” Steve observed.

“Aren’t you?”

“It’s the first time you’ve lost a soldier--”

“We’re not soldiers,” Tony pushed back against that, would always push back against that. He wasn’t following his Captain into war, he was just a guy who might be able to help, who had promised to try.

Steve worked his jaw, met Tony’s eye. “Why are you here?”

“What do you mean?”

Tony knew what he meant.

“You know what I mean,” Steve said. “Here. Talking to me, if we both know we can’t agree on most of this stuff.”

It was hard sometimes for Tony to be sincere. Especially to the face of a man who he had so much baggage wrapped up around.

But he took a deep breath and he sucked it up for a moment.

“Because we’re never gonna be a team,” he said. “But we’re what the Earth’s got right now.”

Steve’s hard expression turned understanding, a little contemplative, so Tony continued.

“Listen, I can’t march to Fury’s fife…”

“Neither can I,” Steve responded. So two things they could agree on then. “But-- maybe it’s time to put that behind us so we can get this done. Loki needs a power source, so maybe we start there, put together a list of--”

“Wait,” Tony furrowed his brow, half an idea in his head, three quarters of one at the reminder of the power source. He hadn’t been thinking about it, had been preoccupied with getting the helicarrier to stay in the sky and getting a traumatized kid to keep his feet on the ground, but he was now.

“Tony--”

“Wait,” he insisted, before he found it. “He made it personal.”

Steve sighed. “That’s not the point.”

“That is the point,” Tony felt stupid for not seeing it sooner. They had even talked about it, a few hours ago in this very lab. “That’s Loki’s point. He hit us all right where we live. Why?”

“To tear us apart,” Steve was chasing Tony’s thought process now, keeping up, keeping it moving.

“Yeah, divide and conquer is great,” Tony nodded. “But he knows he has to take us out to win, right? He wants to beat us and he wants an audience while he does it.”

“Like his act in Stuttgart,” Steve agreed.

Tony pointed at him, eagerly hanging onto this train of thought now. “That’s just the previews. The rest of this is opening night. And Loki’s a full-tilt diva, right? Flowers, parades, a fucking monument built to the skies…”

“With his name plastered all over it,” Steve finished the thought. “The Tower wasn’t a red herring.”

“We gotta get back to New York.”

***

“So the kid’s kind of a genius, then?” Steve would ask him later as they hurried through the corridors of the helicarrier to track everyone else down.

“Yeah,” Tony said flatly. “It’s insufferable.”

***

Peter wasn’t sure what he wanted to say to Natasha, but he knew that he needed to make sure she was okay before he did anything else.

She looked okay, when he tracked her down to the room in the medbay where they had put Clint up-- but she always looked okay. It was one of the marks of a spy, to make you see what they wanted you to see.

Peter paused in the doorway, glancing at the closed bathroom door where he could hear the sound of a running shower going.

“He’s back,” Natasha told him before he could ask. “Loki’s out of his head.”

“Good,” Peter nodded. “That’s good…. Oh,” he fumbled at his belt for a moment before holding his hand out to her. “Your phone. Thanks for-- letting me borrow it.”

Natasha looked down at the offered cell, and then back up at Peter’s masked face.

“Did you get in touch with them?” she asked. “Your family?”

Peter nodded. “Told them to get out of the city. Whether they do or not…” he trailed off with a shrug.

Natasha made an amused sound as she took the phone from his grasp and held it carefully in both of her hands.

Peter breathed deeply. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gotten in your face like that.”

Natasha levelled him with a look. “You also threw yourself in front of a Hulk for me. I think we’re probably even.”

“Still,” he shook his head. “The yelling… that wasn’t about you.”

“You’re never going to trust Shield,” she said simply and Peter shrugged.

“Maybe not. But I trust you,” he laughed a little sardonically. “Against my better judgement sometimes but, yeah, I trust you.”

Natasha looked down at the phone she still held in her hands, and then, as she tucked it back into her belt, she said without any preempt, “Justin Hammer was acting as a pawn for an anti-mutant organization that we’ve been tracking.”

Peter gaped at her, utterly caught off-guard.

“What?” he frowned. “Who-- I mean...?”

“They change their name about as often as we can learn it, so whoever’s in charge knows what they’re doing, but it’s all about taking out enhanced, mutants, inhumans-- whichever word you use, that’s what they’re after,” she explained. “Hammer may not have been a full-fledged member, but he was very easily manipulated by them.”

Peter’s head spun at this new information, but also at the way she had just laid it all out for him like that.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “Why now?”

“You should only give your trust to people that have earned it,” she told him flatly. “I just earned yours.”

Before Peter could formulate any sort of reasonable response to that that didn’t include him hugging her in a way he knew she wouldn’t appreciate, the door to the bathroom opened and out stepped a freshly-showered, suited-up Clint Barton.

“Hey, Spider-Man,” he grinned at him.

“Agent Barton,” Peter nodded.

“You ready for this?”

“Nope,” Peter laughed, walking backwards out of the room and turning the Spider-Man mouth back on. “But that’s the fun part, right?”

***

It was like they had all decided of their own volition that they were going to make this work. And perhaps that had been what was needed of them all along, just the desire to take the task before them and get it done, or perhaps they had needed a proper shock to the system.

Peter wasn’t sure he wanted to believe that they wouldn’t have been up to the task without a loss like that of Coulson, but the bitter part of him knew that it hadn’t hurt in the way it knocked their heads together and made them see the big picture more clearly.

Peter made sure they all had working comms while Clint got his arrows in order and Tony repaired the parts of his suit that had gotten a bit banged up in his battle with the engine. Natasha geared up and Steve found a familiar shield, long held in storage but just as strong and gleaming as ever to strap to his back.

“Dude,” Peter poked at said shield with big eyes and awe in his voice. “Vibranium is wild.”

Steve just smiled at him but Tony threw a wrench at his head. Peter caught it without trying and glared at Tony.

“You just called him dude again,” Tony mocked him.

Peter just shrugged. “I’m leaning into it.”

***

They hadn’t left the city. They weren’t going to leave the city. Peter could try and drag her out of the city himself, but she wasn’t going anywhere if there was a chance he was going to need her.

And sure, maybe that was a stupid way to look at it when she was just a regular person and he was a literal superhero, but in her experience, regular people were pretty fucking necessary to the long game.

Michelle Jones had spent enough of her time in the past few years patching up and watching over a reckless, self-sacrificing superhero to know that they needed the regular people-- the eyes on the ground, the ones that would be there when it was all over.

And it was safe to say May and Ned agreed with her, so they weren’t going anywhere either.

Ned was on his laptop, searching for any signs of what might be coming their way so they could prepare for it and Michelle and May were keeping their eyes on various news channels in the living room in case they had any breaking stories to report.

“Uh-- Guys?” Ned spoke up from the kitchen table. “I might have something…”

“Spider-Man?” May asked, already on her feet and crossing the room to peer over his shoulder.

“Not really,” Ned said. “But there are a bunch of people tweeting about something-- a new installation of some sort?”

“What does that mean?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t know,” Ned shook his head. “No one can get a clear picture of it because, and this is the part that makes me think it’s, uh, not great-- it’s on top of Stark Tower.”

May and Michelle shared a look before Michelle pushed up off the couch and joined them in the kitchen.

“Show us,” May said as Ned was already pulling up a series of blurry, pixelated cell phone photos. They were low quality and difficult to discern, but there was definitely something there.

Something large and mechanical, and glowing bright blue in the center.

“Is that a person?” Michelle asked, pointing at one of the photos. “Like, is that a guy just standing up there?”

“It’s hard to tell,” May sighed. “But nothing would surprise me at this point.”

“We have a developing story, now,” the newscaster on the television drew their attention in a synchronized swivel of their heads. “Coming from the newly refurbished Stark Tower. There seems to have been some sort of-- I don’t want to say explosion, but if you’ll look at the footage with us now, you’ll see some sort of blue energy has erupted on the roof.”

“That’s more like it,” Michelle hurried over to the couch once more, sitting on the very edge with her elbows on her knees.

“Iron Man does appear to be on site,” the journalist continued as footage from the ground played under her voice. “And although we have no reason to believe that this is an incident that will repeat itself or be of any danger to local citizens, we will be keeping you informed. Seeing as Iron Man was spotted in Germany just earlier this morning, we can just hope that whatever caused that incident has not followed him home.”

“Yeah,” Ned laughed drily. “We don’t have that kind of luck.”

***

So shooting repulsor beams at the thing wasn’t going to work out for them, but Tony supposed it had been worth a shot.

As it turned out, the barrier around the Tesseract was pure energy, and thus unbreachable, but they very much needed to breach it if they were going to shut down this portal that a still-brainwashed Selvig was building on the top of his Tower, so time to figure out the impossible.

Here were the things that Tony needed:

His backup suit, since the one he was currently wearing had already taken a bit of a beating.

A way to get the Tesseract off Selvig’s rig and stop the portal from opening.

To deal with Loki, who seemed to be hanging out on the balcony outside Tony’s penthouse-- the freeloader.

And a drink.

“Alright, Jarvis,” he said as he landed on the launchpad and made direct eye contact with Loki. “Plan B.”

As it were, Plan B mostly consisted of figuring it out along the way.

Tony figured he’d start with that drink.

***

Thor was the first one to leave the jet they had commandeered, while they were still in the air too, due to the fact that he could, well, fly. But Peter was the second.

Partially because he was impatient but also partially because they were on a time crunch and they didn’t need to land the jet before Peter could disembark. They just had to get close enough to the tops of the highest buildings for him to fling himself out the back and swing his way to the ground with relative grace and ease.

The minute that Peter’s feet touched the ground, about a block and a half away from Stark Tower, he was trying to direct the gawking crowds of people away from the spectacle despite their clear insistence to keep watching.

Peter knew that the idea was they would shut down the portal before it even opened, but experience had turned him into something of an expect the worst kind of guy so he very much wanted to get all these civilians out of the potential line of fire as quickly as possible.

He scanned the streets from his perch atop a light post as his mind raced for a solution to his problem, freezing when he spotted a traffic cop a block away with a megaphone clipped to her belt.

Peter immediately swung over and landed beside her with a quick bounce on the balls of his feet.

“Good afternoon, Ma’am,” he said. “I’m just gonna borrow this, if you don’t mind.”

He framed it as a request, but knew how actually waiting for permission from a cop was going to work out for him and grabbed the megaphone before she could properly protest, hopping up onto the hood of her car in one smooth movement.

“Hello, New York!” he yelled into the megaphone, waving his free hand to get people to look at him. Usually getting people’s attention as Spider-Man wasn’t particularly difficult, but he was dealing with a double-billing situation at the moment.

“Hey, Spider-Man!” someone in the crowd called back, and Peter threw them a thumbs up in response.

“As you can see, we’ve got a bit of a situation brewing at Stark Tower!” Peter continued, trying to be as concise as possible. “So I need you to all help me out by vacating the area! Please! And thank you!”

He looked down to see the cop whose car he was standing on talking frantically into her radio, which never ended well for him.

“And hey,” he directed his gaze to her. “If you and your pals wanted to help out by clearing the streets and creating some blockades until we’ve got the situation handled that’d be dope.”

“Spider-Man, you are under arrest for--”

“Yeah, figured as much,” Peter muttered to himself as he webbed himself up to the traffic lights and began his journey down the street, calling out evacuation directions to everyone on the street as he went.

***

Tony was a Stark, and thus good at talking his way around an obstacle, and with someone like Loki, who seemed to relish in the talking about his plans as much as he did in acting upon them, it was relatively easy to keep the conversation going long enough for his backup suit to make its way up from the lab.

What he hadn’t been banking on was the whole getting thrown out the window before the suit was actually on his person thing. That was a little harder to talk his way around.

Freefalling towards the sidewalk below him, Tony realized that he didn’t know how the kid was able to stand this jumping off of tall buildings thing with barely anything between him and the rushing wind.

But just when he thought he was about to end up splattered across his own front porch, the suit engaged and he was on his way back up. It was disorienting, sure, but it was a whole hell of a lot better than the falling.

***

Peter, still failing pretty spectacularly at getting anyone to do what he said down on the street saw two things happen in quick succession.

First, a human body came crashing out of one of the upper windows of the Tower and hurtling towards the ground and second, a monolith of energy beamed up into the sky, creating a crack, a growing black hole in the very fabric of this place in the universe.

Because of the quickness with which these things happened, one on top of each other really, Peter had to rely entirely on instinct, which told him to catch the guy first and deal with the portal second.

Unfortunately, the speed with which a person could fall to the Earth was faster than the speed with which Spider-Man could swing from this distance and snatch him out of the air. Fortunately, the guy falling out of the sky turned out to be Tony Stark and he seemed to have the situation at least partially handled.

“Did you just jump out of a fucking window?!” Peter yelled into his comms as he landed where Tony had been about to go splat and stared up at him jetting away.

“For the record, I was pushed,” Tony replied in his ear, a little out of breath but surprisingly calm considering the circumstances.

Peter rolled his eyes but took a running start, swung himself around a light post to gain momentum and hopped as high up the side of the Tower as he could before beginning his ascent.

“I’m assuming that big black hole in the sky is the portal we were trying to prevent?” he asked as he moved.

“Yeah, and we’ve got company,” Tony said. “Wanna get up here and help, or do I have to do everything myself?”

“Cool your jets, I’m on my way,” Peter replied, shooting another web to propel himself upwards faster.

“Thor’s here too, but I think he’s busy committing fratricide,” Tony said. “Or having fratricide committed against him, I’m a bit preoccupied with aliens to tell.”

Right as he said that, one of said aliens zipped past where Peter was clinging to the side of the Tower and Peter, not thinking it through all the way but seeing the Chitauri speeding towards the still heavily populated street, flung out a web and pulled it off course with enough force that it slammed sideways into the gleaming exterior of the building.

“Oh, shit!” Peter exclaimed as the glass shattered and the Chitauri went falling to the ground.

“Kid? You good?”

“Yeah, totally, fine,” Peter floundered as he watched the thing slam into the top of a parked car, setting off the alarm so many feet below him. “Unrelated-- Please don’t charge me for any damage done to the Tower today.”

***

“Did anyone have alien invasion on their Bingo cards?” May asked as they all gaped at the television.

“Where are they coming from?” Ned asked. “Is that a-- I don’t wanna say portal but…”

“I’d say portal,” May responded.

Michelle just stared as a black jet plane sped between the buildings in Midtown and rained down bullets on their alien invaders. She stared as Iron Man fired shot after shot after shot at an endless stream of adversaries falling from the sky.

She stared as Spider-Man jumped on the back of one of the alien hovercrafts and got into a physical fist-fight right there.

Michelle felt May sit down beside her and gently take her hand.

“If they start getting too close to home,” May said. “I’m going to take us all downstairs to the laundry room in the basement, and we’re going to wait this out.”

“We can’t just hide,” Michelle said without looking away from the screen.

“MJ…” Ned began softly, and it was only at the sound of his voice that she realized she had a few stray tears on her cheeks.

She hastily wiped them away with the palm of her free hand and shook her head.

“We can’t just hide,” she reiterated. “Not while he’s out there like that.”

“There’s nothing we can do right now,” Ned responded. “It fucking sucks and I hate it, but there’s nothing we can do about-- that.”

“But--”

“He’s right,” May squeezed her hand. “Our job comes when it’s over. We have to keep ourselves safe so that we can help pick up the pieces when it’s over.”

Michelle chewed on this, thought about what would happen if Peter came back from this battle only to find that any one of them had gotten remotely hurt while he was preoccupied literally saving the world, and couldn’t stomach the idea of him feeling guilt that she knew he would feel despite not having earned a single shred of it.

She also thought about having to watch him get hurt-- televised in HD on their home television set-- but decided that she could handle a little bit of emotional turmoil if it meant being able to help him when he got home.

She had to. Because he was going to come home.

Chapter Text

They had to force the jet into a crash landing a few blocks away from the base of the Tower, because the Chitauri took out one of their wings and they had to either end up in the street or in the side of a high-rise.

Natasha may not have been a woman easily caught off guard, but as she ran out the back of the plane and started making her way back towards the Tower, she was certainly disturbed by how quickly the city had folded into chaos.

There was already rubble. They had only just begun and there was already rubble, already people running for their lives, already smashed cars and shattered glass and emergency vehicles filled with first responders who had never been trained for a threat of this sort.

She had made it less than a block with Steve and Clint close on her tail when a rumbling, groaning sound echoed down the street, stopping the three of them in their tracks.

“Uh, hey, guys?”

“Yes, Spider-Man?” Steve responded immediately to the trepidation in Peter’s voice on their comm channel.

“We’ve got a big boy incoming,” Peter said uncertainly.

“What?” Clint questioned, even as he readied an arrow.

“Uh. You’ll know when you see it.”

And as the rumbling grew closer and a loud screeching sound took its place, a monster like none Natasha had ever even imagined came flying down out of the wormhole and into their fight. Now, Natasha had fought a lot of monsters in her day, she had even played the part of the monster once or twice, but as she stood there, staring down some sort of fucking space whale with teeth the size of a Jeep, she had to steady herself.

“This oughta be fun,” she said.

They all knew it was very much not going to be any fun.

***

“Stark are you seeing this?”

“Seeing it, Cap,” Tony responded as he flew towards rather than away from the giant armored… worm? Whale? Alien. Giant armored alien that had joined the party. “Still working on believing it though.”

“Maybe we all died in the explosion and this is the afterlife,” Peter chimed in. “Which would suck because my Rabbi super never mentioned this.”

“Yeah, that’s why that would suck,” Tony deadpanned. “Does anyone have eyes on Banner? Has he shown up yet?”

“Banner?” Steven asked. “What are you--”

“Nevermind,” Tony brushed it off. Peter wasn’t the only one with a good gut worth trusting, but that didn’t mean they had to waste time talking about it. “Just keep me posted.”

***

“Hey,” Peter called into his comms as he used the momentum of swinging around a corner to kick an alien in the head. “Has anyone checked on Thor?”

“He was still up at the Tower when I left,” Tony replied. “You wanna drop in on him?”

“Yeah,” Peter dropped to a crouch on the roof of one of the shorter buildings surrounding the Tower and looked up. “It’s just gonna take me a minute to get up there.”

It was going to take him more than a minute to get up there, because the Tower was really very absurdly tall, but Peter kept thinking about how Thor had been there when he needed him twice over during the fight for the helicarrier, and felt like even a god might need backup when taking on another god.

Peter was planning his path of ascent when he heard the distant sound of repulsors and Tony’s voice in his ear saying, “Look sharp, Spidey, and I’ll give you a lift.”

His head whipped around to see Tony racing towards him, and Peter understood the offer just at the last possible moment, shooting out a web and latching onto Tony’s boot, holding on with both hands as Tony shot the both of them straight up the side of the Tower at speeds that Peter had only ever experienced in an arcing motion with his webs.

Peter let out a string of curses and incoherent screams, feeling like he was hanging off the back of a rocket ship until they reached the top and he was free to let go, rolling over himself a couple of times as he landed on Tony’s launch pad with a harsh exhale of breath.

“You good?” Tony asked, even as he was already zooming away towards the Big Boy, probably in search of a weak point to hit.

“We are never doing that again,” Peter groaned as he pushed himself to his feet.

As he looked down to the penthouse balcony, Peter could see that Thor and Loki were already there having a heated conversation. It didn’t appear to have gotten physical yet, but it looked to be just about there as he tuned his hearing in to listen to them.

“You think this madness will end with your rule?” Thor asked, fire in his voice as he held his hammer-wielding arm up against Loki’s throat.

“It’s too late,” Loki was breathing heavily and Peter was sneaking around behind him, not wanting to give away his chance at a surprise attack if it was necessary. “It’s too late to stop it.”

“No,” Thor responded, hope growing in his voice. “We can. Together.”

Not even Peter, with his enhanced vision, saw the knife in Loki’s hand until it was buried in Thor’s side, but the moment that he saw Thor on his knees, Peter was jumping from his perch and tackling Loki to the ground.

Peter tried to hold him down long enough to web him to the floor, but Loki got the sceptre between them and pointed it at Peter’s chest, forcing him to stumble backwards just enough to get out of his hold.

Thor grabbed Loki and dragged him to his feet, but Loki nimbly spun around and let himself fall off the ledge, forcing Thor to either let go or fall with him. Peter shot out a web to try and catch him, but Loki was already speeding away on one of the Chitauri hovercrafts, dodging Peter’s aim.

Peter stayed on his stomach at the edge of the balcony for a moment, feeling a little stupid that they couldn’t keep the slippery bastard in one place with the both of them and then flatly said, “Fuck, I’m glad I’m an only child.”

He looked up at where Thor stood beside him. “No offense.”

Thor just shrugged. “None taken,” he said. “You have a point.”

***

It would seem that a number of people in May Parker’s building had the idea to wait out the chaos in the basement laundry room, because the three of them found a young couple down there with an infant and a toddler when May finally managed to drag them away from the television.

May had brought Ben’s old baseball bat that she usually kept by her bed in case of intruders and Ned had his laptop hooked up to the super’s wi-fi so they could keep updated on what was going on outside and Michelle had the nervous sweats like she never had before.

Marjorie and Cam were very sweet 30-somethings and their children were both quiet and well-behaved, but Michelle sort of wished they weren’t there so she could be vocally upset every time a news camera or cell phone camera caught Spider-Man hanging off of one of those alien vehicles or falling a bit too long before he caught himself with a web.

“I can’t just sit here,” Michelle said, standing from where she’d been huddled next to Ned on top of a drier. “I have to do something.”

“What are you gonna do?” Ned asked. “Really. What is your plan?”

Michelle crossed her arms over her chest tight enough that she could feel it in her shoulder blades and thought about it. She thought about all the people out there and she thought about the group of superheroes that were trying to help them but were a little too preoccupied with staving on the incoming army to offer any personal attention to.

She thought about Peter Parker, who had left his suit at home when he went to take the SATs and then came across an apartment fire on his way home-- who still helped drag people away to the other side of the street even though he couldn’t go inside.

“I’m gonna help,” Michelle said as she grabbed Ben Parker’s baseball bat and walked up the stairs.

***

“Hey!” Peter said as he swung past a group of police setting up a perimeter. “Whoever got the police to cooperate-- you gotta teach me the trick!”

“Sure thing, son,” Steve replied.

“Oh, nevermind,” Peter frowned. “I didn’t realize the trick was literally being Captain America.”

***

Ned and Michelle hurried down the street, gathering people cowering behind overturned cars and in alleys that may have felt safer but really weren’t with the way the sides of buildings were getting knocked out.

The two of them led civilians into subway stations so they would be underground and out of the line of fire, they handed lost children over to firefighters or paramedics, they kept an eye out for danger as they got closer and closer to the heart of the fight.

***

Fighting alongside Clint felt natural, it even felt comfortable if any sort of fighting could really feel comfortable, but still they were starting to get fatigued and the army spilling through the hole in the sky was showing no signs of slowing.

Natasha kicked a Chitauri in the center of its chest and set it flying backwards into the unforgiving surface of a car just as lightning struck, bringing with it Thor landing beside them moments later.

He slammed his hammer into one of the Chitauri’s helmets and sent it flying, and then out of nowhere Peter dropped from the sky as well, flipping to a crouch and sweeping his leg under one of the alien’s to give Steve the opening he needed to take it out.

“What’s the story from upstairs?” Steve asked the newcomers, now that they had a minor break in the wave of assailants.

“The power surrounding the Cube is impenetrable,” Thor explained.

“Thor’s right,” Tony came on through the comms. “We gotta deal with these guys.”

“I thought that’s what we were doing,” Peter said as he refilled the web shooter cartridges at his wrists.

“How do we do this?” Natasha asked.

Steve opened his mouth to speak but Peter pointed a finger at him.

“Just warning you, if you say as a team I’m gonna laugh in your face,” he said. “Not because I don’t agree, but because there are aliens invading New York and I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Join the club,” Clint chimed in flatly.

The way Steve looked between the two of them had the faint hint of amusement to it, but he ignored the opportunity to join in the banter. At least for now.

“Loki’s gonna keep this fight focused on us,” he said instead, which Natasha thought was definitely not what he was going to say pre-interruption. “That’s what we need to happen, because without him these things could run wild...”

Steve kept talking, but Natasha’s focus was pulled away, to the sound of a puttering motorcycle as it came down the empty, ravaged street towards them. There was relief to seeing Bruce Banner in that moment, and also guilt that they had failed him, that she had made him a promise in a second of fleeting desperation and broken that promise almost immediately.

Breaking promises was one of the key facets of spy work, but as Bruce was changing in that crowded space below the lab Natasha had actually meant what she said. And she had failed him.

“Doc,” Peter was the first one to breathe out, the first one to take hurried steps to meet where Bruce was dismounting his motorcycle, and Natasha realized that the kid was probably feeling a bit of guilt himself. Maybe with less intensity though, having been more accustomed to the feeling than her. Not because he had earned it, but because his heart was just that big. “Doctor Banner, are you okay?”

“I should be asking you that, I think,” Bruce replied in all his rumpled glory as he looked at the lot of them, at the disaster zone the city had become in his absence.

“You didn’t hurt anyone,” Peter assured him, quieter than the front he had been putting up all day, the front he had doubled down on after Coulson’s death.

Bruce didn’t vocalize his gratitude for that information, but he nodded at Peter in such a way that it was clear.

“So,” he said instead, motioning half-heartedly to the chaos. “This is all pretty horrible.”

“We could use a hand,” Natasha said, more of a suggestion, even a plea, than a statement.

“Is that Banner?” Tony spoke up over comms, the only one not physically present for this conversation.

“Yeah,” Steve replied. “We got him.”

“Then tell him to suit up,” Tony said. “I’m bringing the party to you.”

Natasha looked up as Iron Man swung around the corner, speeding towards them with a direction and determination that hadn’t been there even a year ago when she had first met the man. Following him was a sight even more ridiculous-- the big boy, as Peter had deemed it and a moniker he seemed adamant to hang onto, was chasing Tony down.

“I dunno what parties were like in your hay day, old man,” Peter said as his knees flexed and his fingers pressed down gently on his web shooters. “But this is not it.”

Natasha snorted, which was the second most surprising thing going on in the current moment, but she sobered herself as they all settled into fighting stances, preparing for the worst as it barreled straight towards them.

“Doctor Banner,” Steve said, even as Bruce was already stepping towards the fight. “Now might be a really good time to get angry.”

“That’s my secret, Cap,” Bruce smirked at him over his shoulder. “I’m always angry.”

A number of things happened all at once then: the Hulk made one hell of an appearance, nailing the big boy right in the nose; Peter let out a delighted whoop as he swung out of the way, saying something that sounded an awful lot like that’s the coolest thing anyone’s ever said; Tony blasted the thing, right at its weakest point and sent it collapsing to the ground; and Natasha realized something.

She was a part of a team.

***

The fight kept going, even after Hulk showed up and gave them the show of a lifetime.

Even as Thor blasted them with lightning as they came through the portal, even as Clint picked them off one by one from the rooftops, even as Tony shot them down with repulsor beams and heat-seeking missiles and Steve and Natasha got their hands dirty on the ground, the flow of Chitauri wasn’t letting up.

Peter was bruised in ways he had never been before, and he could feel his stamina fading with every new threat he had to take on. Not to mention the fact that he was going to start running low on web-fluid soon and then all he’d have left were the already scraped and beaten limbs on his body.

He landed next to Natasha as she shot down a Chitauri with one of their own guns, both of them breathing heavily and visibly showing the effort in all of their movements-- a rarity for the two most genuinely acrobatic of the group.

“None of this is gonna matter if we don’t get that portal shut,” she said as Peter let his hands fall to his knees so he could catch his breath.

“It’s pure energy,” he shook his head. “No amount of fucking firepower is gonna take that thing out.”

He didn’t notice it at first when a phone started ringing, because there was too much going on for it to really cut through the rest of the noise, but after a moment he heard it, and he pushed himself upright to share a look with Natasha before she pulled the cell phone off her belt and answered.

“Hello?” she said with obvious bafflement that didn’t really fit in Peter’s previous experiences with Natasha’s poker face. He supposed they were all a little too preoccupied to be fitting anyone’s perceptions of them at that point, though. “It’s… for you,” she held the phone out to Peter.

He looked at her, he looked at the phone, he looked around at the brief break in combat they were experiencing, and then he took the offered phone.

“Hello?”

“You gotta shut down that fucking wormhole nonsense.”

“MJ?”

“We’ve been able to get the people on the outskirts of Midtown into basements and subways,” she continued frantically. “But there are too many civilians still inside buildings right around the Tower.”

“I’m sorry, do you know all this because you’re watching it happen on TV safely from a hotel room in DC?” Peter’s heart rate picked up for a number of reasons at the sound of her voice.

“Sure, let’s go with that,” she deadpanned.

“This is the opposite of what I asked you to do, Michelle!” Peter exclaimed with indignation, barely even noticing Natasha’s eyes on him anymore.

“Peter, focus,” Michelle said with all the authority of being one of the few people he listened to indiscriminately. “How are you going to shut it down?”

He exhaled harshly. “I don’t know. I really-- I mean, there’s no gun, no bomb that can take that thing out.”

“So don’t use a gun or a bomb,” she responded, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe it was, actually. “You’re a scientist and an engineer. Get up there and figure it out.”

Peter knew it was a little more complicated than that, he knew there wasn’t just going to be a way to jerry-rig the thing and turn it off, but Michelle did have a point. He hadn’t even considered his own brain as a way to find the solution here, but she had, with all that faith she had in him despite his feeling like he’d never earned it.

“Okay,” he said simply, because it was worth a shot at least. It was worth a shot because they were running out of options. “Yeah, alright.”

“Also,” she continued, barreling forward in a way that felt natural and new at the same time. “Ned told me you were going to ask me out and the answer is yes, so don’t die before you can buy me dinner, okay?”

His breath hitched and his heart stuttered and he didn’t have time to really jump for joy the way he wanted to in that beat of disbelief, but he did manage to say, “I was… I was actually gonna take you to the movies? That fancy theater by the fancy Thai place.”

“Oh,” all the bravado left her voice, ramping up the same awkward delight that Peter felt. “That’s good too. I mean, if it hasn’t been blown up.”

“Spider-Man,” Natasha’s voice cut into the warm little bubble of a world Peter had fallen into. “We gotta go.”

“Right,” he knocked himself back to reality. “Stay safe, Em. I’ll see you in a bit, okay?”

“Go get ‘em, Tiger.”

He hung up the phone and tossed it back to Natasha.

“We need to get back to the Tower,” she said and Peter nodded.

“On it,” he said, already picking her up and swinging away even as she protested because Peter was ready to end this thing so he could finally, finally go on a movie date with the one and only Michelle Jones.

***

By the time they made it to the top of the Tower, Peter could tell Natasha was thoroughly over his way of transportation. Especially when she shoved him away from her upon landing and stumbled to regain her balance on the gravel rooftop beside the rigged-up Tesseract.

“Okay, okay, sorry,” he said to her.

“Just-- take a look at this thing, it’s fine,” she brushed him off.

Peter nodded, walking over to the base of the portal and knowing that it was far beyond his wheelhouse just at a cursory glance. He was too tired for this, too out of his element, too worried about the fact that his people were putting themselves in harm’s way instead of keeping themselves safe like he had asked--

“Selvig?”

Natasha’s voice startled him out of his spiral and he turned around to see her gaping at the man in question as he pushed himself to his feet on the other end of the roof. Peter grounded himself, he prepared himself to fight, he asked, “Is he…?”

“No,” Natasha, who was closer responded certainly. “His eyes are back to normal.”

“The scepter,” Selvig said, looking up at the portal in horror and then back to them. “Loki’s scepter-- the energy. It’s-- God, look at this,” he was on the verge of breaking it seemed, just at the sight of what he had done.

“It’s not your fault,” Natasha said to him gently while Peter stood back and let her handle this one. “You couldn’t fight it.”

Selvig met her eye. “I think I might have, actually,” he said, to both of their surprise. “I built in a safety to cut the power source.”

“Loki’s scepter,” Peter reiterated, understanding overcoming him.

“It might be able to close the portal,” Selvig confirmed.

Hope bloomed in Peter’s overworked lungs.

“Well, let’s find the fucker.”

***

Tony flew straight into the mouth of a giant worm alien and blew it up from the inside out, because creativity had always been his strong suit, and forethought had always liked to stay on the backburner.

He was taking a breather on the comfort of the cracked concrete sidewalk, when a new voice joined in on his communicator.

“Stark,” Fury said. “You have a missile headed straight for the city.”

“How long?” Tony asked as he stood up and blasted a Chitauri’s head off all in the same motion.

“Three minutes, max,” Fury responded. “The payload will wipe out Midtown.”

And wasn’t that a treat to hear, Tony thought, as he had Jarvis put all of their power into the thrusters and flew away from the invasion and towards a more homegrown threat.

***

The scepter, as it turned out, had been left just lying around after Loki had an apparent run-in with Hulk, and Peter was able to web it up to them from a lower balcony with ease.

Natasha took ahold of it and, with Selvig’s direction, began pushing it through the energy field and towards the center of the device-- the Cube.

“You got it?” Peter asked her, standing just to her side in case the force got a little too strong and they needed an extra set of hands on it.

“Yeah,” she nodded, certain and hopeful but careful all the same.

“We can close it,” Peter said into his comm. “Does anybody copy?”

“Do it!” Steve’s voice was the first to hit his ears, followed quickly by Tony’s.

“No, wait,” he said.

“Tony?”

“I’ve got a nuke coming in. It’s got less than a minute ‘til it blows.”

Peter’s heart dropped into his gut.

All of this work, all of this fighting, all of this searching until they stumbled upon a solution and still there was more for them to survive? Who would fire a nuke at an island already being ravaged and proving its audacity in response?

Who had decided that they were not worth saving?

“Can we redirect it?” Natasha asked, holding the scepter steady where it was.

“No,” Tony said. “But I know just where to put it.”

It took Peter all of four and a half seconds to figure out what his plan was, but at the end of that problem solving, he felt very much like he might throw up.

“Absolutely not,” he said with more confidence than he was feeling. “Tony-- Don’t you fucking dare,” he hopped up onto the ledge of the roof and saw the shape of a missile, balanced on top of an armored man’s back as it raced towards them.

“Kid, it’s gonna be okay.”

He sounded too resigned for Peter’s liking. He sounded too prepared for an inevitable that Peter refused to so much as entertain.

“There’s another way,” he insisted, voice breaking down the center like the rest of him. “There’s gotta be another way--”

“Stark,” Steven cut him off. “You know this is a one-way trip?”

“Hey! No, we’re not encouraging this!” Peter yelled into his comm, not taking his eyes off of Tony as he got nearer and nearer to them. Logically he knew Tony’s plan was already in motion at this point, that there was no stopping it or him, but they had already lost too much in one day and Peter would not stand any more of it. In fact, he wasn’t sure how he could.

“I’ve been thinking, Underoos,” Tony said with a casual tone that could only be fabricated by a man on the brink. “You really should take your job back up at SI, y’know? Not to pressure you, but we could use your brain in R&D and Pepper… Pep could really use the help--”

“Shut up,” Peter let out a ragged breath, tears threatening to make an appearance because it sounded too much like a goodbye, too much like take care of things when I’m gone.

“It’s gonna be fine,” Tony said one more time before he and the missile were zooming up the side of the Tower and right past Peter as it flew directly up, up, up alongside the beam of blue energy and straight into the hole in the sky.

Peter stared up at it, the fear of the day finally all compounding right on top of itself a dozen times over and making him implode from the inside out. His breath came too quick and his hands were trembling and Tony had disappeared from sight but he couldn’t take his eyes off of where he had just been.

He could hear the Chitauri collapsing all across the city, could see the giants tumble to the ground as they all seemed to have their strings cut, but still he didn’t look away, waiting for Tony to fly back out and make a joke about marionettes and tease Peter for getting so emotional about the whole thing.

A beat passed. And another.

“Give him more time,” Peter muttered. “He’ll be right back.”

“Close it,” Steve said, resigned and defeated despite the clear win.

“No,” Peter fought back with intensity. “Give him a minute.”

But he heard shifting behind him, energy spurting, and turned to see Natasha pressing the scepter forward.

“No!” he lunged towards her because he couldn’t lose Tony-- he couldn’t keep losing people, he really couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t--

“Peter, we have to,” she said, pulling the sceptre out of his too-weak grasp. “The debris will come back through.”

And Peter knew that she was right, so even as he protested he let her shove the tip of the sceptre into the center of the Tesseract, staring back up at the portal as it began to shrink in on itself.

The beam of light collapsed back into the device and the wormhole rippled around the edges and Peter didn’t even really have any conscious thought except sudden and overwhelming grief for an endless passing moment until…

“That’s more like it,” Natasha said, smile in her voice as they watched a body come falling through the portal at the last possible moment.

“Motherfucker,” Peter breathed out in shaky relief, relishing in it right up until he realized that Tony wasn’t activating his thrusters.

He was still falling.

“Motherfucker,” he repeated, stepping closer to the edge, readying a path in his mind that might make it possible for him to catch the man without sending them both hurtling towards the ground, and was about to leap for it despite the risks when Hulk appeared out of seemingly nowhere and caught him.

Just caught him like it was nothing and slowed their descent along the side of an adjacent tower so their impact when they hit the street was lessened.

Peter was flying from the top of the Tower and swinging towards the ground before they had even finished their sliding landing.

“Tony!” he called as he stumbled to his feet out of both urgency and exhaustion in equal measure. “Tony!”

***

When he opened his eyes, feeling like a piece of well-tenderized steak, Tony was met with a handful of concerned faces and a Spider-Man mask.

“What just happened?” he asked, catching his breath as he looked up past Peter to see Steve and Thor and a roaring Hulk. “Christ.”

He felt Peter fiddling with the edges of the arc reactor, presumably making sure it hadn’t come loose or wasn’t malfunctioning at all, but met Steve’s gaze first.

“We won,” the Captain said, as though even he wasn’t sure whether he should believe it or not.

“You need to have Jarvis run diagnostics on this,” Peter said without looking up from the light in Tony’s chest, but suddenly Tony was on the verge of bubbling laughter, a grin tugging at his lips.

“Kid.”

“A fall like that could have knocked something loose--”

“Kid.”

“And what about your heart-- Is your heart--”

“Hey, Doogie,” he cut Peter off with a bit more force to get him to look him in the eye. “We won.”

Peter took a deep breath, sitting back on his heels and seeming to absorb it, slowly but surely. He was probably in a little bit of shock.

They were all probably in a little bit of shock.

“Told you it’d be fine,” Tony continued with a grunt as he tried to push himself up to his elbows and get his bearings after being in space and then flung through the air.

“Fuck you,” Peter shoved at his shoulder none too gently, and Tony heard a crack in his voice that sat heavy on his heart. “You scared the shit outta me.”

“I’m gonna make it up to you,” Tony replied, a bit more of his usual bravado coming back with every word. “You ever tried shawarma?”

“Shawarma?” Peter questioned while Steve snorted out a laugh beside him.

“Yeah, there’s a shawarma joint about two blocks from here,” Tony said. “I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always wanted to try it.”

“I think it’s like doner kebab,” Peter said, letting himself get dragged out of his own head, much to Tony’s gratitude. He knew it could be hard to get the kid out of there, especially after something like this. “There’s a great kebab place in Queens that we go to sometimes.”

“We are not finished yet, my friends,” Thor reminded them, but even he carried the hint of a smile on his face.

“Yeah, but,” Tony said flatly. “Shawarma after?”

***

Tracking down and arresting a Hulk-bloodied Loki was the easiest thing they had done all day, except for the fact that they were all dead on their feet and in need of some serious calorie replacement after the physical ordeal they had been through.

(If Peter webbed up his mouth, crouched down in front of him, and calmly informed him that even Spider-Man's no-kill policy had its limits, no one commented on it. If he grabbed Loki by the jaw and made sure he remembered Phil Coulson's name, no one commented on that either.)

Peter and Tony tracked down proper cases to lock up the Tesseract and scepter so they could safely hand them over to Thor and then the whole group of them made their way down to the lobby of the Tower.

“Are you sure you don’t need medical?” Peter asked, walking side-by-side with Tony towards the front entrance.

“Jarvis signed off on it,” Tony tapped at the reactor in his chest. Peter was kind of jealous that he had been able to take off his suit and just wear regular clothes in this moment. “You watched Jarvis sign off on it.”

“Okay, I’m just saying--”

“Spider-Man!”

His head shot towards her voice, hurrying forward as she tried to push her way through a group of Shield agents. And was she carrying a baseball bat?

“Ma’am, you have to take a step back--”

“Get out of my way--”

“Hey, hey, it’s fine,” Peter rushed into the mess. “She’s fine, she can be here-- Oof!”

The moment Michelle had an opening through the people she had her arms flung around his neck and her chin hooked over his shoulder in a tight, desperate sort of embrace.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Peter assured her with his arms around her middle. “Are you okay?”

Michelle pulled away and held a hand at the nape of his neck, her hand carrying the bat hanging down at her side as Peter gripped her waist. She studied him, as though trying to see through the mask for a moment and he let her, feeling with his senses as the Shield agents left but the Avengers watched curiously from the other end of the lobby.

He didn’t particularly care at the moment.

“I’m okay,” she told him quietly. “I… I was scared, but I’m okay.”

“May and Ned?” he asked, almost afraid to, but knowing she would have led with that if they were hurt.

“They’re safe,” she nodded. “Helping people find their way home. May was basically running a crisis center out of your laundry room there for a minute,” she grinned at him.

“Of course she was,” Peter laughed before catching sight of the baseball bat once more. “Can I ask what that’s all about?”

Michelle held it up and shrugged slightly. “Just in case?” she said with an uncertain lilt to her voice. “I dunno. I panicked.”

Peter gaped at her. “Were you planning to take on an alien army with-- I’m sorry, is that Ben’s bat? That thing’s like twenty years old, Em!”

“Spidey.”

“No, if you get to be mad at me when I’m reckless then I get to be mad at you--”

“Spider-Man.”

“It’s really only fair when you think about it. It’s really--”

Michelle dropped the bat with an echoing clatter in the nearly-empty lobby, took his face in both hands, and kissed him right over where his mouth was beneath his grimy, dirty mask. Quick and closed mouthed and stunning in every sense of the word.

Somebody catcalled them from behind him and somebody whistled, but Peter Parker only had eyes for her as she pulled away and looked him right in the whites of his eye lenses.

“You kissed me,” he murmured, all full of awe for her. Always, but especially now.

“Yeah,” she breathed.

“In front of the Avengers,” he pointed out, just to watch the blush blooming up her neck grow.

“Oops?” she grimaced.

“Nah, I don’t care,” he laughed brightly. “I really like you, MJ.”

“I know,” she grinned. “I really like you too.”

Peter was beaming at the way her eyes shined and even Tony’s call of, “Hey love birds, it’s chow time! You coming?” wasn’t enough to ruin the moment for him.

“We were thinking shawarma,” he said to Michelle. “You wanna have dinner with us?”

She visibly balked at him, glancing over his shoulder at the group of extraordinary people that had just saved the world, and then shook off her disbelief.

“Screw it,” she said, picking back up the bat in one hand and taking Peter’s with the other. “Why not?”

“This doesn’t count as that date you already agreed to, by the way,” he insisted as they followed the team out of the building.

“Of course not,” she chuckled.

“Because I am gonna take you to the movies.”

Michelle made a face at him. “I think that theater got blown up,” she told him sheepishly. “I passed it on my way here.”

“What?” Peter’s shoulders dropped. “No way, I already bought tickets!”

“You bought tickets?” she looked at him with soft eyes.

“The Agnes Varda film festival.”

“I love Agnes Varda,” she breathed.

“I know you love Agnes Varda,” he said, before raising his voice at the group in front of them. “Whichever one of you blew up the theater on 6th owes me fifty bucks!”

Michelle laughed over a chorus of wasn’t me!

It was the only sound that mattered.

***

They all liked Michelle more than they liked him.

It was exactly as things should have been.

***

Six days later, the city was still in shambles, but they finally had their feet underneath them enough to start rebuilding.

Thor was back on Asgard, holding his brother accountable for what he’d done in whatever way their homeworld found fit, and the rest of them were getting settled into a new world where there were threats waiting in the wings that they did not yet know how to handle.

Tony spent a great deal of time with Pepper upon her arrival home. The minute that airports got back up and running she was flying back to him and he had her in his arms as soon as humanly possible. He kissed her hard and breathed her in and let her reprimand him about his recklessness until she got it out of her system and was able to just hang onto him, remind herself that he was okay.

That they had made it out alive, yet again.

They were up in the penthouse, a few of the windows boarded up from their run in with a Hulk, looking at the plans Tony had been working on for the remodel of their half-destroyed home. The holographic Tower stood tall on the desk in front of them and Pepper wrapped an arm around his waist before she said, “Remember a few months ago when you suggested a vacation?”

Tony craned his neck to look at her where she was leaning into his side.

“Yeah,” he responded softly. “You said there was too much work to do with the company.”

“I think I might be changing my mind,” Pepper rested her head on his shoulder and poked at the hologram, moving a few things around.

“I can get on board with that,” Tony kissed the top of her head. “We should probably stick around for a couple of weeks to make sure everything’s in order for the rebuild efforts but-- the place in Malibu is empty.”

Pepper hummed in agreement. “The beach sounds lovely.”

“Then the beach you’ll get,” he promised, relishing in the quiet for a beat before finding himself unable to keep from asking, “Why the change in heart?”

Pepper pulled away enough to look him in the eye, serious and a little bit scared but so full of love.

“I thought you were dead,” she said with a melancholy, aching sort of smile. “And I know you’re okay this time but… You’re not done yet either, are you?”

Tony couldn’t lie to her. Not just because she would be able to read the dishonesty on his face in a heartbeat, but also because he simply didn’t want to. He was realizing, with passing time and constant change that all he wanted to do was keep her safe and make her happy.

But this was part of that. The not stopping was part of that.

And so he said, “No. I don’t think I can be,” and he kissed her gently on the lips when she nodded with that same ongoing fear in her eyes.

They just stood there for a moment, looking over their little empire, leaning into each other’s warmth, until Jarvis very politely spoke up.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Sir, but you have a visitor on the balcony.”

Pepper laughed softly. “Let him in, Jarvis.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Tony looked at her as she stepped away with a smirk on her face. “Jarvis is she allowed to just let people into my home?”

“Our home,” she corrected him. “I’ll be working in my office if you need me.”

“I will,” he called after her as she stepped into the elevator. “Because you just let a public menace into our home!”

“Who’re you calling a menace?” Peter whipped off his mask and scowled at Tony.

“Hi, Peter,” Pepper called across the room.

He grinned. “Hi, Pep! Bye, Pep!” he waved as the doors closed on her before turning to Tony. “You working on the new Tower design?”

“Sure am. Take a look,” he motioned Peter over to the desk and watched his thinking face take over as he studied the changes being made to the building.

“Avengers Tower,” he muttered, maybe a little bit of youthful enthusiasm touching the words. “Fucking unreal.”

“Very real, actually,” Tony chuckled. “Real enough that Bruce is moving in. Cap too, probably-- at least part-time.”

“Really?” Peter looked at him with a teasing grin. “You’re gonna have roommates?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “They’re getting their own apartments,” he explained. And then, a bit more carefully. “There’s space for you too. If you want it.”

And that seemed to catch the kid off-guard, or at least startled him enough to bring about that gobsmacked face that it was a real shame got hidden when he wore the mask. It was quite the treat in and of itself.

“What?” he gaped at Tony.

“A place for you,” Tony zoomed in on the hologram. “Right there, actually.”

Peter stared at it for a moment, tilting his head to the side and everything, before something seemed to settle in the set of his shoulders and he met Tony’s eye with a confidence that had been growing right in front of them for the past year.

“I appreciate the offer,” Peter said, polite but certain. “But I think I oughta stick to the neighborhood for a while. Help with the rebuild.”

“Fair. Totally up to you,” Tony said easily. “But you know you saved the whole world last week, right? Maybe Spider-Man’s jurisdiction is growing. In the grand scheme of things, Earth is really nothing but a neighborhood itself, you know?”

“Maybe,” Peter shrugged. “But Spider-Man’s from Queens. Plus, who’d keep Ned out of trouble if I was all the way in Midtown all the time?”

“Alright,” Tony brushed it off with a smile, not actually at all bothered by the refusal because it was exactly what he had been expecting. Spider-Man was from Queens, after all. “Offer stands though, if you ever need it.”

“Thanks, Tony,” Peter responded sincerely. “But I think I’ll stick to bothering you in the lab on weekends.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Tony turned to face him fully. “Wanna help set up the remodel? I’m headed down there now.”

“I would,” Peter started backing away sheepishly. “But I kinda got someplace to be.”

Tony frowned. “What could you possibly have going on that’s better than literally designing a state-of-the-art lab from scratch?”

Peter grinned, one hand on the door that led back out onto the balcony.

“I’ve got a date.”

***

Michelle opened the door of her apartment to find Peter Parker with his rumpled clothes and stuffed-to-the-seams backpack smiling a lopsided grin at her and holding up a bag of takeout in one hand and bodega flowers in the other.

The city was still under a lot of stress, and most restaurants weren’t open, or if they were it was for takeout only, so going on a date had quickly turned into staying in on a date, but Michelle wasn’t complaining. It meant she got him all to herself for the whole night, that she could curl up with him on the couch and kiss him to her heart’s content without a gross mask getting in the way.

It meant they could talk and they could be awkward and bumbling and giddy without the eyes of strangers putting pressure on this brand-new but somehow still deeply familiar thing of theirs.

“Ready for date night?” Peter asked, a bit of nervousness touching his voice, as though he was still uncertain as to how fully and completely gone she was for him. As if he still had doubts.

And that just wouldn’t do.

“Sure am, Tiger,” she said with her entire chest and heart and lungs.

Michelle grinned at him, grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him into a firm kiss.

Now, that was more like it.

Peter Parker will return in...

“Breakthrough or Bust”