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They attack the HYDRA safe house shortly before sunrise.
The only people defending said safe house are Peter and Leo, and Leo slams his cell door open and starts spitting out orders, but then promptly gets clobbered over the head and keels sideways.
So that just leaves Peter. And he’s not even going to try to fight a whole team of Avengers. He looks up at Iron Man filling the doorway. “I surrender.”
The face plate lifts. “Sure. Okay, kid,” the man says. “Can you walk?”
They cuff his hands in front of him. “Just a precaution,” they tell him. And they put him on their weirdly shaped plane. “Everything will be okay,” they tell him. As if Peter hasn’t ever been told what exactly the Avengers do to HYDRA soldiers unlucky enough to cross their path.
They carry stacks of labeled files on board, laptops and hard drives, and a box that Peter recognizes as the one containing his web-fluid research.
“What’s your name?” someone asks, but Peter is too busy staring at the hundreds of buttons lighting up the display in the cockpit, and wondering what they all do.
They take off. Peter worms his way towards a window and presses his nose flat against it, gazes down at the trees rapidly getting smaller and smaller below.
One of the men is keeping him under careful observation. “Thinking of jumping out?”
“I’ve never been on a plane before.”
He has also never been captured before and he is not sure what to do. Escape, probably. Maybe they’ll put him and Leo in the same cell, and then Leo will tell him what to do.
Another man hovers in front of him and lays a hand on his bruised wrist. “Not broken,” he murmurs. The yet is left unsaid.
-
Peter keeps his eyes on the sun’s trajectory and the landmarks down below, and knows that he is right outside New York when they land. The Avengers open the cargo door into a field. And then they just wait around.
A man offers him a bottle of water. “Everything will be okay, kid,” he repeats, though there is a tension in his voice that makes Peter think he doesn’t even believe it himself.
The fact that he is still alive probably means they’ll want to either experiment on him or torture him. Or both. Probably both. He sips the water, then picks at the label until it comes loose, and begins to fold it into an origami swan.
A woman with red hair is sorting through one of the boxes they took from the bunker, and finds a file with his picture on the front.
“Peter, fifteen,” she says as her eyes scan the pages.
“Enhanced,” she then says, and the tension immediately racks up a notch or two as everyone else turns to stare at him.
Peter drops his paper swan to the floor and fiddles nervously with the handcuffs, and suddenly realizes that these are entirely normal handcuffs made out of entirely regular metal. Because they didn’t know about his enhanced strength. Which means that this is probably as good a moment as any to escape.
So he does, pulling the shackles apart in a single motion and lunging for the open cargo door. The woman dives in his way first, but he flips across her outstretched leg, lands on the grass and breaks into a sprint.
There’s probably only two people in the entire world who can keep up with him when he is at top-speed. And of course both of them happen to be on the plane he has just escaped. The super soldier with the shield and the Iron Man.
The mechanical suit catches up first and blasts compressed air at him, knocking the wind out of him and sending him reeling to the grass. Before he can scramble to his feet, the super soldier is already on top of him, pinning him down. Peter growls and struggles, his injured wrist screams in protest.
“Kid, stop fighting,” the man pants, “we’re not the enemy” and does he actually think Peter would still believe that at this point? He snarls and kicks and tries to headbutt.
The super soldier curses. “He’s strong. Nat, get the– We’ve got vibranium handcuffs!”
She sprints back to the plane.
Peter wriggles and tries to bite and wonders why Iron Man hasn’t tasered him yet. He is just standing next to the two of them, one mechanical arm lifted in front of him but not doing anything other than watching.
“Kid,” the super soldier says. “Peter. I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t- ouch.” Peter managed to jam his knee into the man’s back.
Now Iron Man moves, stepping forward, and moments later Peter can feel cold metal securing his legs down. And the woman is rushing back with a fresh pair of handcuffs.
“I surrender,” Peter says, even though they are probably going to kill him now.
“Heard that before,” Iron Man snaps.
-
The super soldier hauls him back onto the plane. “Shit, you have super-strength? Why didn’t you break out of our handcuffs right away?”
“Um,” Peter says, exactly in the tones of a teenager who simply hadn’t thought of it sooner. “Well I… I didn’t want to escape before.”
The man shakes his head. And then… hands him a bag of M&M’s. And it seems unlikely that he’d give M&M’s to someone he is about to kill, so Peter figures he’s in the clear for now.
The small group gathers around the woman with the file. “Enhanced strength, speed, senses, healing…” she sums up. “He – can climb walls…?”
“What does that even mean?”
Peter opens the bag and sorts the M&Ms in neat rows by color, while the Avengers start a discussion about which organization gets to torture him first.
“Steve,” one of them says, “we can’t hand him over to Ross. He’s… Look at him. There’s no way Ross will be able to-”
“But what are we supposed to do with him? We don’t have the experience or the resources to-”
“We’ll figure something out. I don’t care what you have to tell Ross. He’s staying at the compound.”
-
“Here’s clean clothes. And a towel. You can throw your old clothes in there, we’ll get rid of them.”
The super soldier uncuffs him, but they’ve gone through about four different doors to get to this bathroom, so there isn’t much point in trying to escape now.
“I’m Steve, by the way,” the man says as he places a bar of soap on top of the bundle of clothes. “If you get to stay here, we’ll try to fix you up a bathroom where we feel comfortable leaving you alone. But right now – yeah – I have to supervise you.” He says it as if it’s abnormal to have someone hovering around and staring at you while you shower.
The man doesn’t stare, though. He turns away as Peter undresses, pointedly gazing at the wall.
-
The room they lock him in is big. Very big. He can stand up straight without hitting his head against the ceiling, and spread his arms wide without touching the walls on both sides. There is a bed in one corner and a toilet in the other.
People filter in and out. Women, men: their gazes on him are dark and heavy. A doctor pokes him, her face tight and her lips pressed together. She wraps a bandage around his wrist. He pulls it off as soon as the door has closed behind her and tests its strength. Good enough to strangle someone in a pinch.
A man with short, curly hair comes in and places a book on his mattress. “Nat said teenagers don’t read anymore, but I’m afraid we can’t give you anything electronic just yet. If you can think of something else you want to do, just ask, okay? We’re working out a deal with Ross so you’ll get to stay here.”
Peter very kindly doesn’t strangle him. Yet.
He should have, because they are on to him by that evening.
The super soldier steps into the cell, followed by the woman with red hair. Peter curls his hands into fists and snarls when they step closer.
“I’m sorry, kid,” the man says, and then he holds Peter down until the woman has extracted the roll of bandages from his pocket.
Peter still manages to kick them both hard enough to leave bruises.
-
They barely feed him. Peter begins to feel faint by the second day. It is a clear sign of what to expect from his captors. Whatever misinformation they received, it clearly put him on their radar as a person of interest.
They’re soon going to be disillusioned. He knows the location of a grand total of three HYDRA bases. None of them are very important; just outposts, really. He doesn’t know anything of actual value. But if he says as much, they will probably still torture him and then kill him.
The woman with the red hair comes in. “I’m Natasha,” she says, kneeling next to the bed. “How are you feeling today?”
Hungry, he doesn’t say. Because that’s exactly what she’ll want to hear.
“Your wrist is looking better,” she says. And, rather ominously: “you’re going to be staying here for a while, Peter.”
“So you’re not selling me to the Ross guy?”
“We’re not… We’re not selling you. We’re going to help you, Peter. We’re not your enemy.”
“HYDRA is your enemy.”
“You’re not HYDRA.”
“Yes I am. I’m loyal.”
The woman is beginning to look angry, so at this point Peter decides to shut up.
“We won’t hurt you,” she says. Yet, she doesn’t say. Or unless you don’t cooperate.
“You won’t have to stay cooped up in this tiny room forever,” the woman continues, her eyes flitting from wall to wall. “We’re just trying to figure out a way-… We need to be sure that you won’t run. For your own safety. But you’re not our prisoner. We’re here to help you.”
And she launches into a whole explanation about how they just want Peter to be safe, and do they actually expect him to fall for that lie, when they are deliberately starving him?
-
They come in with a syringe on the third day. They bring the super soldier in with them, which means they are going to hold him down.
“Remember me?” the syringe-man says. “It’s Bruce.”
Always nice to learn someone’s name before they inject you with their torture poison cocktail.
“It was made for Steve,” the man explains, holding up the syringe. “So it’s calibrated to dampen his powers. Which means it will suppress some of your strength and speed, but not much else. And it won’t hurt, I promise. We just need to make sure you won’t attack us or break out. Then we can let you out, and you can walk around a little. That sounds nice, right?”
Peter is pretty sure he won’t be able to attack anyone in his current state, either way.
Maybe they’ll feed him more, once he is less of a threat. It’s weak, Peter tells himself, that hunger makes him so compliant. But he doesn’t struggle at all when the needle enters his upper arm.
-
They let him out of his cell the next day. But his breakfast is still the same paltry size.
“We’ve closed the entire east-wing down,” the red-haired woman explains as she points around. “You won’t be able to get out. We just need to be sure that you won’t go back to HYDRA, do you understand?”
Peter feels far too faint to think about anything right now.
Do they want him to starve? Or are they planning to wait until he is too weak to stand and then begin their interrogation?
He can’t follow along with everything she is saying. She is explaining things too fast on purpose, so he’ll make a mistake and give her an excuse to hurt him.
“What if I try to escape?”
“Don’t,” she says.
“But what will you do to me if I try?”
She regards him steadily. “Nothing.”
Which is such a blatant lie.
But Peter figures he’ll find out soon enough.
There is a bathroom, without any scissors. And a bedroom, without anything electronic. And a room with lots of books, but without even a single sharpened pencil.
“You can keep sleeping in the same room,” she says nodding in the direction of his cell. “Or take the bigger bedroom. Whichever you’re more comfortable with. We just want you to be comfortable. Everything else… we’ll figure it out, somehow.”
-
They give him the sedative in the form of a tiny yellow pill with his measly breakfast. “Just take it,” the super soldier tells him. “If you take it with breakfast every morning, we won’t have to inject you, all right? FRIDAY will be monitoring to make sure you do take it.”
-
The interrogation starts in a weird way. A man finds him in the book-room and puts a few papers on the table in front of him with an expectant look on his face. “Chios mentioned you know your science. Before he chewed cyanide.”
“Chios.”
“You know, tall guy, big ears, bit of a drooping eye, explosively violent.”
“Leo.”
“Sure, if that’s how you knew him.”
Peter drops his eyes down to the papers in front of him. He doesn’t particularly care that Leo is dead, except that he’ll probably get blamed for it when he reports back to his superiors.
“You remember my name, right?” the man says.
Peter turns a page. He recognizes the formula for the web-fluid he had been developing. Is that what the Avengers want from him? Is that why he is being kept alive?
“It’s Tony,” the man says.
“Okay,” Peter says. He doesn’t care.
He closely analyses the notes someone else made in the margins. If he… When he escapes, he can give this information to his superiors, and they’ll see that he has done something of value and maybe they won’t…
The syringe-man comes in and looks unhappy, and the two men start an argument right in front of him about what is and what is not appropriate. And the syringe-man takes the papers away from him. “You don’t need to worry about any of that right now,” he says.
Which is just as well, because Peter is beginning to feel light headed and the words on the page are swimming in front of him. He leans forward until his forehead hits the table.
“You all right, kid?” one of them asks. His voice sounds amused. Like he’s enjoying this. He probably is.
Peter pushes his chair back and stands, but immediately stumbles.
An arm catches him and pushes him back down in the seat. “Hey kid…? Something is... Bruce, his medicine. You must have given him a wrong dosage.”
“I don’t understand how...”
Peter’s stomach betrays him right then by growling.
The syringe-man cocks his head. “Are you hungry?”
That is a trick question if Peter ever heard one. They just want him to admit it so they… they can… use it against him somehow, taunt him.
“Did you eat your breakfast? Tony, did he eat his breakfast?”
“He always eats it. He eats all his food. FRIDAY monitors him.”
“I wonder if he…” the man trails off.
“What?” the other one snaps, impatient.
“You know, Steve has to eat about three times the usual amount because of his metabolism.”
And then they get bogged down in some discussion about biology and chemical processes.
And then they leave.
-
They return with a tray full of food that they place on the table directly in front of him, and Peter wonders what kind of trap this is.
“Are you hungry?” The syringe-man asks again. “We just have Chinese take-away leftovers, but we can get more.” He dumps some rice from a container into a bowl. It smells nice.
Maybe it’s not a trap. Peter won’t be any use to them dead, so they probably do want him to actually eat enough. He stares down at the chopsticks and wonders if they would be any good as a weapon. He picks up the plastic spoon instead and takes a few bites.
One man leaves. The other stays. “Kid, you… Fuck, you can tell us if something is wrong. If you need anything. If you’re hungry, or hurt, or cold… We’re here to help you, okay?”
“Okay,” Peter says, and sneaks the chopsticks into his pocket.
-
“Pete, I don’t want to hold you down again, all right? Can you just hand them over?”
Peter glares at her from under his blanket. “I don’t have anything.”
“FRIDAY monitors everything you do. So why don’t you just stop trying to sneak weapons into your room?”
“I didn’t sneak anything.”
She doesn’t even need the super soldier’s help to overpower him and take the chopsticks back. Damn yellow pills.
-
He feels significantly better the next day, after a hearty breakfast. So he smashes a chair against a window in the book-room, because now seems like a good time to escape. The window doesn’t even crack, but a leg comes off the chair, leaving a sharp, splintery edge. He grips it tightly and raises it in front of him, backing into a bookcase when the super soldier steps into the room.
“Better give me that, son,” the man says. “Or did you have a plan?”
He doesn’t. But he knows what will happen if he surrenders, so it’s hard to make his fist uncurl.
“Just give it to me, Peter. You’re not in trouble.” He steps closer, and Peter snarls and swipes at him with the piece of wood. The super soldier grasps his wrist in an iron grip until the weapon clatters to the floor, and then pins Peter’s arms to his side, and then practically carries him back to the small cell in the far corner of the east wing. “Okay, kid,” he says as Peter tries to kick him, bite him. “Okay… okay…”
-
It’s a few hours before the door opens again and people step inside. They don’t beat him. They just bring him more food.
“Peter, don’t try to escape. We’re helping you. We’re keeping you locked in for you own good. This is not a prison. We won’t hurt you. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Peter says, and sneaks a granola bar into his pocket. He’ll need supplies when he does escape next time.
-
Now that he is no longer hungry, it’s easier to determine the exact effect of the yellow pills. They are nothing like the kind of sedatives he usually gets. They don’t make him drowsy, and they don’t affect his sight or hearing, or his ability to climb walls, but they do make him unable to punch through a metal door.
“Why would you even start with that?” The red-haired woman asks with a frown as she presses an ice pack against his purple knuckles. “That door would have been hard to break down if you did have your superstrength. Next time, start with trying to punch through some wood or something, okay?”
“Okay,” Peter says, and means it.
-
“Do you like hot chocolate?”
Peter glances up from his seat on the floor.
They took the chairs and the wooden table out of the book-room, and replaced them with enormous floor pillows. Peter already tore one open at the bottom to stuff his modest collection of stolen granola bars inside.
The man in the doorway is holding two steaming mugs.
Peter closes the book he had been reading and hugs it to his chest, warily following the man’s movements as he steps closer and seats himself on the pillow next to him.
The man holds one mug out, but just beyond Peter’s reach. “Remember my name?”
Peter knows this game. The one where you don’t get food until you tell people what they want to hear. The smile on the man’s face is something unfamiliar, though.
Peter tucks his hands underneath his legs and looks away. A moment later, the mug is placed right next to his feet.
“It’s Tony,” the man says.
“Okay.”
The mug is made of a hard plastic, he notices when he picks it up. Not something he can smash to use the shards. And the contents are warm but not hot. Not something he can throw into the man’s face to incapacitate him.
For lack of a better thing to do, he takes a sip, and it’s… it’s… really good.
“Made it from scratch,” the man says. “Cinnamon is my secret ingredient.”
“Secret?”
“Between you and me. Can I trust you with that?”
Peter eyes him over the rim of his mug. “No, probably not,” he says and the man laughs, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
-
There is still wooden furniture in the bedroom. But if he rips a leg off a chair or a table, they’ll just come in right away and pin him down and take it.
Instead, he pries old, rusty nails out of the wooden wardrobe, twisting and scraping until all his fingers bleed, but he manages to dig out four of them. Four precious, tiny, sharp objects.
-
The woman appears in the book-room less than an hour later. “I need the nails that you hid inside that green pillow,” she tells him and panic hooks its claws into him, because that’s where he has hidden all his supplies.
“I won’t take the food, Peter,” she says in her cool, steady tone. “You can steal food, if that makes you feel safer. You just can’t hide a weapon. Do you want to take them out, or shall I?”
Peter doesn’t move from his place in the far corner, so she sighs and squats, grabs the pillow, turns it over and immediately locates the small hole near the seam. She digs inside until she has plucked out all four nails. She leaves him everything else.
-
“Do you know how to play?”
“Yes,” Peter says, because people always get angry when he admits he doesn’t understand something, and how complicated can something called ‘snakes and ladders’ be, anyways?
The syringe-man gives him a look and then explains the rules anyway. He doesn’t explain the stakes, though, and that is a problem, because now Peter doesn’t know what will happen if he loses. Or if he wins, because sometimes people don’t like that either.
“What color do you want? I always play green,” the man says, his lips quirking as if that was some sort of joke.
“Blue?”
“Good choice.”
The game seems to be entirely luck-based, which is also a problem, because Peter doesn’t usually have luck on his side.
“Whoops,” the man says when the blue piece lands on the first snake. “Now you have to go back to number fifteen.”
Peter moves his piece back, feeling nervous despite the man’s apparent calm.
He loses. It doesn’t seem to matter much.
“Better luck next time. Did you have fun?”
“I… I don’t know,” Peter admits.
“I’ll bring something else tomorrow.”
-
He climbs up and puts his elbow through the gypsum ceiling tiles. He doesn’t actually think it will work. He just wants to see what will happen. Behind the ceiling tiles is a narrow crawlspace that leads to nothing but dead ends with concrete all around.
He abandons this latest attempt and picks another book to read, instead, sagging into a pillow. He likes books about animals, with lots of pictures.
-
The woman comes in with a plate of dinner and a broom. She doesn’t say a single word about the hole in the ceiling. She just puts the plate on the floor next to his pillow and starts sweeping up the pieces of plaster littering the floor. “We got lots of ice cream for dessert,” she says. “What flavor do you like?”
Tell me everything you know about HYDRA would be a less complicated question to answer. Peter pokes at the steamed broccoli with his plastic spoon as he thinks about what to say.
She kneels in front of him. “I know it’s hard,” she says. “I’ve been there. It will get better. Just take your time, we won’t rush you. And we won’t hurt you. I know you don’t believe that, but maybe you’ll believe it a little more with each day.”
“I like chocolate,” he says, because it’s the only flavor he can think of.
“I’ll bring you a bit of everything,” she decides. “You can’t choose unless you know what your options are. Just remember that you always have a choice, Pete.”
-
“Do you want to go outside?” the super soldier asks. It feels like another trick, but Peter isn’t so sure anymore. He isn’t so sure what they want.
“Go where?”
“Just in the garden. Tony will watch you. He has all his suits on stand-by, so don’t run, okay? You’ll save us and yourself a lot of hassle.”
“Why don’t you want me to run? I don’t have… I don’t know anything useful. And you’re not even interrogating me. You should-” He has never tempted fate before, not like this. But the not knowing is driving him crazy.
Grey-blue eyes scrutinize him quietly. “We’ve told you, Peter. You’re not safe with HYDRA. They hurt you. We need to be sure that you won’t try to go back to them. We just want you to be safe.”
“I… That’s… You’re lying.”
“Which part?” the man asks, calmly. “Are you saying they didn’t hurt you, or that we don’t want you to be safe?”
Peter doesn’t know how to answer that. “Why do…?” Why do you care, he wants to know, but it feels dangerous to ask too many questions, so he doesn’t finish his sentence.
The super soldier still looks at him, with eyes that feel like they pierce him right through. “Do you want to go outside?” he asks again. “It’s a nice day.”
-
The hot-chocolate man just eases back in a deckchair on the lawn, sipping at a cold drink. He doesn’t seem all that much on top of things.
But Peter has no doubt that any escape attempt right now would end in disaster, and permanent imprisonment in his cell, and electric shocks, and lots of actual sedatives. His best chance at getting the upper hand, is to pretend that escaping is the furthest thing from his mind, and bide his time.
So instead of testing his boundaries, he sticks close to the man, sitting down next to his deck chair and burying his hands in the grass.
“Have you ever whistled on a blade of grass?” the man asks. He sets his drink aside and slides forward to sit on the ground next to him. “You need a nice and flat blade of grass, like this one. Clench it between your fingers like so. And then-“ the man blows through his fingers, producing a low, sharp whistle that makes Peter jump.
“Try it.”
Peter nods along, his eyes on the man’s hands as he searches out another blade of grass. His other senses focus on his surroundings. He tunes his super hearing. He can hear the wind through an endless sea of trees. Cars whizzing over asphalt in the distance. And he can hear a river. It’s nearby, only a few hundred feet away. If he had his superspeed, he could reach it in under a minute…
The wind suddenly picks up and a few dead leaves flutter past. One or two get stuck in his hair. The man chuckles, reaches out and cards a hand through Peter’s hair to get rid of them, the motion almost thoughtless. Peter isn’t sure why he doesn’t shirk away.
-
They don’t let him hide anything, but they let him hide food.
That’s a loophole, even if Peter isn’t sure how to use it, yet.
-
He puts the yellow pill in his mouth, but doesn’t swallow it. It spends the whole morning wedged between his teeth and his inner cheek. No one comes in to hold him down and inject him. So that feels like another loophole.
It has dissolved into his mouth by noon, but if he does this again and then escapes right after breakfast, he’ll hopefully have at least some of his strength and speed. Enough to break free.
-
The board looks really pretty, with creamy white and deep black pieces in peculiar shapes.
“Do you know how to play?”
“No,” Peter slowly admits.
“Chess can be a little complicated, but we’ll start with the basic rules.”
Peter listens to all the rules, and the game is not based on luck at all, which is a problem, because he won’t have anything else to blame if he messes up.
But the syringe-man never really seems to care either way.
Peter copies the man’s first few moves exactly, and the man’s eyes twinkle when he takes Peter’s first pawn with his knight because now Peter has to think of something else to do. Like take the white knight with his black one-
“No, don’t do that,” the man says. “Because then I’ll move my bishop over there, see? And it’s check mate.”
It feels like he is tricking Peter again and Peter narrows his eyes at him, but he does move his hand to a different piece.
He wins after another twenty-six moves.
“Huh,” the man says, and doesn’t look angry. At all.
-
The super soldier brings him the food this morning.
Peter always gets a granola bar in a plastic wrapper with his breakfast. It’s like they’re just inviting him to hide it away.
He doesn’t. For the first time, he tears the wrapper open and just eats it right away.
He can tell the super soldier is pleased about it. Good. Maybe now he’ll let down his guard a little.
“Did you sleep well?”
He actually did. The bed is always comfortable and the room is always warm and he can leave his nightlight on as long as he wants. All of it is better – better than what he usually gets. He pops the yellow pill into his mouth. “Can I go outside this morning?”
The man smiles. “Certainly. I’ll see if Tony is available.”
-
It is a brisk, clear morning.
The hot-chocolate man rubs his hands together. “Jeez kid, the sun is barely out. You couldn’t have waited until the afternoon?” he smiles as he says it, though, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
Peter eyes the tree line, shifting his weight from one foot to another.
The man pauses by his side. “Do you want to take a little walk around the compound?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Okay, kiddo. No rush.”
“I just…” Peter says. He isn’t sure why he feels a need to say anything, today of all days. Knowing what he is about to do. “I just don’t know what you want from me.”
“We don’t want anything from you.”
“So when do I get to go home?”
A short silence. “HYDRA is home, is it?” the man then asks.
“I’m loyal.”
“Well, don’t fucking bother. That room I first found you in – You couldn’t even stand up in there without hitting your head on the ceiling.”
“You lock me in, too.”
“Peter, look at me.”
That’s a dangerous request, one that people always make when they’re planning to smack you across the face.
“Forget it – sorry, relax kid. Just tell me this. Did any of us ever hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You blasted me and hurt my wrist and pinned me down, and again, and again, and you drugged me-“
The man sounds angry, now. “Yes. yes – okay. I… We… First off, some HYDRA asshole hurt your wrist in the first place, that wasn’t-…” he sighs and runs a hand through his hair, before letting it flop back down. He inhales, and continues in a more measured tone: “If anything we did caused you pain, I am sorry, Peter. We don’t want you to get hurt, we want you to be safe. And the vile shit they did to you... We’ve never done any of that. You’ve got to … Don’t you realize that?”
“You’re trying to trick me.”
“We’re not, Peter. We’re not.” And then he does a weird thing where he puts both arms around Peter and squeezes a little, one hand patting him on the back, while Peter just awkwardly stands there. “We just want you to be okay, kiddo,” the man says as he keeps patting.
“Why?” Peter asks, his cheek pressing uncomfortably against the man’s shoulder.
“I don’t know. Because everyone is allowed to be safe and healthy and happy, and you should always help people who aren’t. What else is life about?”
Every single thing the Avengers ever told him, has led to feelings of consternation, of self-doubt. But right now, he shuts them all down. Because he only has one thing to focus on. “Okay,” he says.
After another pat on the back, the man turns and saunters back to the deck chair, sagging down on it.
This seems like as good a time as any.
The yellow pill is still wedged between his teeth and inner cheek. He scoops it up with his tongue and discreetly lets it drop into the grass--
Immediately, the watch around the man’s wrist pings. “Mr. Parker did not take his medication,” a cool, female voice speaks.
“What the…” The man glances from his watch up to Peter, eyes wide.
And Peter runs.
“No! FRIDAY, get him!” The man yells, voice breaking, and seconds later the air is filled with the whirring of ten, twenty, thirty mechanical suits taking flight, but Peter runs, and dives, and runs, whizzing past trees, across a high fence, straight towards the sound of rushing water.
“PETER! PETER!” The voice doesn’t sound furious; it sounds desperate.
He is nearly there. A suit swoops into his way, but he slams into it and sends it spiraling through the air.
He reaches the banks, leaps forward and splashes into the murky waters, diving down to the bottom.
They’ll probably expect him to let himself be dragged along by the current, so instead he blindly fights his way upstream, hands scraping along sharp rocks, holding his breath until he feels like his chest might explode. He breaks through the surface, turning over. He can still see mechanical suits hovering in the distance, like a horde of angry bees, so he heaves in another breath and dives again.
When he comes up a second time, he is alone.
-
The closest HYDRA base that he knows about is in Washington D.C., posing as a cell phone shop. The irony is that there’s probably at least one in New York, too, but he has no chance of finding out where it is.
So he hitches a ride with an overly friendly truck driver who sings along to every song on the radio and doesn’t lodge any complaints about Peter’s sopping wet clothes.
Peter leans his head against the window and tries to mentally list all the information he gathered on the Avengers. It’s not much. It’s certainly not enough to – to appease anyone. No one is going to pat him on the shoulder for knowing that Iron Man makes his hot chocolate with cinnamon.
“Girlfriend in Philadelphia?” The truck driver asks.
“Washington.”
He whistles between his teeth. “That’s commitment. Helluva loyal boyfriend.”
“I’m loyal.”
-
The truck driver pulls over at a gas station a few miles outside of Philadelphia to fill up the tank. “Can I buy you an ice cream, squirt?” he asks.
“Okay.”
“What kind?”
“I… I like chocolate,” he says, because the woman had brought him every single flavor imaginable and he had tried all of them, but he still preferred the chocolate. You always have a choice, she had said, and: you can’t choose unless you know what your options are, and he hadn’t thought about it because he never thought about options, because there was always just one thing, one goal, one assignment.
He pulls his legs up and wraps his arms around them and tries not to think. It’s easier to not think and just do what – what you’re supposed to do.
-
His clothes are dry by the time he reaches the cell phone shop. Not a single customer in sight. There is a woman behind the counter. He doesn’t know her. She doesn’t know him.
“Can I help you?” she asks, perfectly polite.
Peter knows a few codewords, but none are specifically tailored to this situation. He could cycle through them, but he figures, if he tells her ‘I’m looking for Hydra’, that’ll do. She’ll usher him to the back and… and someone else will take it from there. Take him from there.
“No, thank you,” he says. “Sorry, I—Wrong shop.”
-
He ends up on the side of the road again, with a cardboard sign saying ‘New York’ and with nothing of the determination he felt this morning. All he feels is terrified.
A woman in a small, red car pulls over and sticks her head out the window. “Hi there! I can take you to Baltimore.”
“Okay. That’s… okay. Thank you.”
“Hop in.”
He does, attempting to keep his face stoic —
“Are you all right, honey?” she asks with a worried frown.
— he failed.
“Yes. Just. I have to… I have to get home, and I - - I…” his voice wavers.
“Okay, honey,” she says, in the tone of voice you’d use to lure a stray dog closer. “Where do you live?”
“Poughkeepsie,” he says, because he doesn’t actually know where the compound is.
“I’ll drive you there, then. Don’t worry, just kick back and relax.”
Peter wants to cry. “But that’s so far out of your way.”
“Don’t sweat it, honey. We gotta help our fellow man, huh?”
“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
-
It’s raining when he gets to Poughkeepsie, because of course it is.
He asks to be dropped off on the bank of the Hudson river. He should find the compound if he simply makes his way upstream.
He does what he has always done. Keep his goal in mind and push every other thought aside.
The sun takes its final bow beneath the horizon.
-
It has to be past midnight when he stops in his tracks. Because he knows these trees, this particular curve in the river. When he looks to his left, he can just see the outline of the compound above the trees; silhouetted against the dark sky.
He finds the high fence that surrounds the grounds and scales it, jumping down on the other side.
He had expected dozens of mechanical suits to shoot up into the sky as soon as he stepped foot on the lawn. But it stays utterly silent. He sees no lights burning behind any of the windows. Everyone must be sleeping.
Somehow, just crossing the lawn to get to the building is the hardest part. But he makes it there. He can’t imagine having much luck knocking at the front door. So he climbs the wall until he reaches one of the balconies.
The balcony doors are locked. No sound from inside, no movement beyond the glass panes.
He could punch his way through of course. Breaking in instead of breaking out.
Somehow, he can’t bring himself to do it. And ends up huddled in a corner of the balcony, forehead leaning against the balustrade.
Maybe they won’t want him to come in. Tell him ‘this whole thing is too strenuous, we have better things to do, just go back to HYDRA’. What a joke that would be.
He flies to his feet when the balcony doors slide open.
“Fuck… Hi. Hey, kid. Are you…?”
“I don’t know,” Peter says. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
A hand lands on his arm. Not around it, to keep him in place. Just lightly touching his elbow. “Hot chocolate?”
The man puts him on the couch and gently rubs his wet hair with a tea towel and wraps him in a blanket and gives him cookies with his hot chocolate.
“Tony.” Peter says.
“Yeah, that’s me, kid.”
Peter nibbles on a chocolate wafer as he thinks about what else to say. “I’m sorry?”
“That’s all right, Peter. I’m just so… I’m so happy you’re here.” Tony’s eyes are suspiciously shiny, his voice wavering. He looks at Peter with an expression full of raw, genuine affection, and something snaps deep inside Peter’s chest. A monsoon of emotions washes over him and he buries his face in his blanket-covered arms as he breaks into sobs.
He doesn’t even realize Tony has his arms around him until his cheek suddenly connects with the man’s chest. Tony’s hand burrows into his hair as he murmurs into Peter’s ear. Everything they’ve told him a thousand times already. That they will help him, that they won’t hurt him, that he is safe. He still isn’t sure whether to believe it, but it’s the choice he made. A leap of faith. Maybe the Avengers are trying to trick him. But at least they’re nice about it.
Tony bends down and wriggles Peter’s shoes off, and then his own. He stretches out on the couch, hauling Peter closer to his chest, blankets and all. His shirt is wet and gross from Peter’s tears, but he doesn’t seem to care.
“I just thought I had to… I thought I had to.”
“I know, kiddo.”
“What- what time is it?”
“About a half past one.”
“Everyone is sleeping, I guess.”
“Everyone is out looking for you, kid. I was downstairs, calling in every last outstanding favor I have when FRIDAY spotted you.”
-
Natasha and Bruce get back first.
“Did you have dinner?” she asks, practical as ever.
“No.”
“Shit, sorry,” Tony says. “I didn’t even ask.”
She moves away to the kitchen. Bruce sits on the coffee table in front of them. His hair is wet, too.
“Sorry,” Peter repeats.
“Good to see you made it to home base,” Bruce says. “That was one hell of a game of hide and seek.”
“I prefer chess,” Peter admits.
“Me too. We’ll do that tomorrow.”
-
“He is tired,” someone says, and he is woken from a half-sleep by a hand squeezing his shoulder. “Do you want me to take you to your room? Or do you want to sleep right here?” It’s Steve, complete with the mandatory wet, dripping hair.
Peter pushes himself off Tony’s chest and glances down at the couch. “But I might run away again.”
“Please don’t.”
“I don’t...” Peter says. “Just… Just put me back in the cell. Please?”
Steve hesitates. “Maybe,” he says, “you want to sleep right here, and I’ll sit in the chair over there and I’ll stay awake. And I’ll stop you if you try to escape.”
“You’ll stop me?”
“Yes, I promise. Pinky-swear.” He holds his hand out, lifting the pink.
Peter frowns down at it, puzzled. Does Steve mean he’ll cut off his own finger if he breaks his promise? That seems excessive. “That’s okay. You don’t have to… I’ll just not run away.”
“That would help.”
Tony gets up off the couch. Natasha takes his plate away. Bruce flicks off a light. They leave, as Steve settles into an arm chair. His heartbeat is steady. The fridge whirrs. Rain lashes against the windows. All in a perfect symphony.
And if the super soldier happens to nod off during the night, it’s all right. Peter is not going anywhere. Not out of loyalty. Simply out of trust.
And because he has a chess game to win.