Chapter Text
1. the decision
It comes down to this:
His best friend, or the kids that absolutely despise him.
Peter hits one of Steve’s outstretched hands, knuckles against palm. Steve nods. “Good. Better.”
Rolling his eyes, Peter resists the urge to bite out something harsh and sarcastic, May and Pepper having told him that, since he got a lot of anger out in the original training shit, he needs to treat it like actual training now. He has a majority of his strength back, but his body isn’t able to maintain energy like it could before. This is more to help build up his ability to use his strength for longer, without the risk of passing out from exhaustion because his body isn’t accustomed to being used after a week of being bed ridden, followed by the past five weeks of slow, torturous healing. It’s necessary, he knows, and brings him that much closer to finally being back to full health again, to being able to finally put on his Spidey suit and go back out on patrols again, but that doesn’t mean he likes hearing Steve talk.
“Are you feeling tired yet?” Steve asks, all professional and serious and—Peter squints, frowns—a little bit concerned, too. “Your time is getting better, but overworking yourself isn’t safe.”
“Helen said—”
“Helen told me that too much strain can cause damages that your healing may not fix,” Steve states, a furrow to his brow. “I understand that you don’t like me, and I understand that I fully deserve that, but I don’t want you to hurt yourself, Peter. I talked to Helen to come up with the best way to train with you.”
Peter presses his lips together and glowers a bit, wishes, once again, that he could have trained with Sam instead, but Steve and Bucky are the only ones with enough enhanced strength to be able to make actual progress, and Bucky didn’t feel comfortable with it when Peter asked him to do it instead. Which, really, is fair enough—even if it is training, in Bucky’s eyes, it’s a risk of hurting someone again. As much as Peter hates doing this with Steve, he’s already built some kind of trusting friendship with Bucky over the past week and he wouldn’t dare ask Bucky again after he’s already politely declined.
Steve is still looking at him when he repeats, “Are you feeling tired yet?”
“I feel fine,” Peter says, and it isn’t a lie—he can tell that he only has maybe ten minutes left in him before he’ll start to feel weaker, but he’s good for now. “I can keep going.”
It looks like Steve isn’t sure if he believes Peter or not, but he simply nods and holds up his hands again, palms out and body braced for the impact of Peter’s punches. “Five more minutes,” he states, eyes flickering over to a digital clock installed into the wall across from them to check the time. “Go.”
Instantly, Peter starts throwing punches again, reminding himself—a bit bitterly, to be honest—the tips that Steve gave him on how to hold himself, all the little things that will only serve to improve Peter’s ability to fight and prevent him being hit as much in the future. A few hits are hard enough to make Steve have to brace a foot behind him to prevent being pushed back, and Peter doesn’t want the guys approval, but he feels some kind of satisfaction at the genuine approval on Steve’s features as he assesses the progress Peter has been making, the good job’s and the nice one’s that he murmurs. Truth be told, no matter how much Peter dislikes Steve, a childish part of him is giddy at the aspect of making Captain America impressed, and that part won’t fully go away no matter how much Peter tries to smother it.
The minutes tick by briskly, and Peter is honestly feeling a little pumped about the fact that they’ve been training for an hour and a half straight and he feels like he could keep going for a while without needing a break, but Steve says, “Stop,” at the five minute mark and lowers his hands with a nod. “I don’t know what your strength or stamina is like at full health, but you’re already much better than you were last week. If Cho’s calculations are right, I’d say you should be good with strength in a few days, and then we can start working on defensive training instead of focusing solely on offensive.”
Peter gets a little excited at that, then snuffs that excitement with a sniff and a shrug and a half assed, “Sure, whatever,” as he spins on his heel and marches over to where his water bottle is sitting on a bench build into the wall, below the clock. As he takes a long drink, he checks the time—a little bit past three in the afternoon. He frowns, lowering his water bottle. Harley’s been having self defense lessons with Sam the past few days, starting a three on the dot. Maybe they cancelled today, but…
The back of his neck tingles and his stomach swoops so suddenly that he thinks he might be sick, which would suck because he hasn’t puked in four days and he was hoping that part of the healing process was over with, but before he can start to panic about finding something to puke in, his bracelet starts to vibrate where it’s sitting snugly around his wrist. Instantly, his eyes widen, water bottle slipping from his fingers and falling to the matted floor as he pays attention to the vibrations, mentally pulling up his memory of Morse code so that he’s prepared to figure out who it is that pressed the panic button.
Four quick buzzes, a pause, one quick buzz followed by a longer one—
H A
“Harley,” Peter breathes, having to swallow what he thinks is his heart lodged in his throat as his head whips up, finding Steve looking down at his own bracelet in alarm. Any resentment, any cold tone or harsh quip that Peter would usually say is quickly forgotten in his fear. “Is your—is he—?”
“He hit the big one,” Steve says. “Everyone got an alert.”
That’s the big guns, alright? Peter remembers Tony telling them when he gave them their bracelets. Only press it three times if there are aliens falling from the sky or some shit. I trust you guys to know the difference between a problem and an Avengers sized problem.
If Harley pressed the red button three times, if he’s calling out for the entire team…
“Friday,” Peter croaks, hands shaking. “Where’s Harley?”
Nothing.
“Friday,” Peter says again. “Friday.”
No response.
Silence.
And then, who knows how many floors below, a loud, ground shaking explosion.
If Harley’s being honest, it totally not fair, the fact that he’s being held hostage right now. He barely ever goes to the lower floors, but the one fucking time that he decided to look in the intern labs to see what people are working on (because of curiosity and boredom) just happens to be the one fucking time that someone manages to shut Friday down and attack Stark Tower like a bunch of assholes. Usually, he’d be upstairs, getting ready for his fourth self defense lesson with Sam and wondering what’s gonna be for dinner afterwards, but instead, he’s here, with a bunch of terrified college kids who were just trying to do their damn jobs.
“Why don’t you have a badge?” Pale Bitch—yes, Harley has given each of the intruders nicknames, if only to distract his own brain from the fact that he’s kind of terrified right now—asks for the third time in a row, the sneer audible in his voice despite a mask covering the lower half of his face. “Who are you?”
Harley rolls his eyes. “I already told you, dipshit. I live here.”
“Why would a teenager be living in Stark Tower?” Pale Bitch demands, still clearly not believing what Harley’s telling him. “What, are you some kind of secret love child or something?”
“I like to call myself a charity case, actually,” Harley quips, grinning in a way that hopefully hides the way his hands are shaking by his sides. “Some kind of pseudo son to a billionaire, maybe.”
Pale Bitch narrows his eyes, keeps his gun pointed at Harley’s head as he takes a step forward. “You trying to say you know Tony Stark?” Harley just shrugs. The gun gets shoved closer to his face, nudges against his nose while Pale Bitch shoves Harley back against the wall. “Answer me!”
“Knowing him is an understatement, man,” Harley says, trying to lean away from the barrel of the weapon but not having enough room to do so. “Did you miss the part where I called myself a pseudo son and told you that I lived here? Dude’s basically my dad. And, buddy, I hate to break it to you, but he’s a protective kind of parent and he’s gonna kick your ass for waving that thing in my face. And that’s, like, best case scenario for you, too. If my boyfriend gets here before Tony, you’re gonna need surgery.”
It looks like Pale Bitch is about to curse him out again when another one of the intruders approaches, and Harley quickly dubs this person with the name Dumb Shoes when he sees that they’re wearing a pair of sneakers that are a ugly, puke-y shade of green. Dumb Shoes pushes Pale Bitch in the shoulder, the action light but seemingly still meant to be aggressive, before saying, “We’re setting it up here.”
Pale Bitch blinks, apparently shocked. “Here? I thought we were going as far up as we could.”
“Stairwells and emergency exits have all be secured,” Dumb Shoes says. “With his tech tampered, his suits aren’t usable. We’re twenty floors from the top. They won’t be able to get out.”
Really, it’s an accident, the way Harley snorts. He tries to smother it, to keep it quiet, but it’s laughable, how stupid these people are. Sure, they were somehow able to tamper with Friday without her being able to detect it, but they really think they’re clever enough to outsmart a literal genius? The only person on this planet that’s smarter than Tony is the god damn Princess of Wakanda. These idiots clearly underestimate just how tech savvy Tony really is. Friday is built into the suits individually. Her being offline in the tower doesn’t mean the suits can’t be used. Christ, these people are dumb.
And angry, clearly, he realizes when Dumb Shoes and Pale Bitch both level him with glares. “What are you laughing at?” Pale Bitch practically growls, leans in so close that Harley can smell whatever fruity gum they must have been chewing earlier, barrel of the gun now pressed to his temple.
“You,” Harley says, dumb mouth not knowing that this would be a good time to shut up. “Your idiocy, to be specific. Pretty obvious that y’all don’t know shit about Tony’s tech.”
Before Pale Bitch can sneer something else out, Dumb Shoes pushes him out of the way and swings, punches Harley hard enough to send him falling straight to the floor as the pain and dizziness clouds his vision. Thankfully, Dumb Shoes didn’t aim for the nose—if they had, it would have been broken, for sure, and he’s one of the poor bastards in this tower that doesn’t have enhanced healing. Not that having enhanced healing makes it hurt less, but it sure will hurt for a whole lot longer.
Of course, being punched in the eye definitely isn’t a picnic, either, and he still feels dizzy when he says, “Jesus, that fuckin’ hurt. Better hope it doesn’t bruise. Peter’ll be mad if you fuck up my pretty face.”
“Shut up,” Dumb Shoes spits, and then one of those puke colored sneakers comes a lot closer when they kick him in the gut, making the air leave his lungs suddenly, painfully. He tries to think of what to do, how to defend himself, but all him and Sam have covered so far is the basics of hand to hand combat. Nothing about being a hostage that’s getting their ass beat has been brought up quite yet.
Thankfully, Harley’s able to seal his lips together this time, bites his tongue to stop from nervously rambling on any further. He’s already gonna have a black eye and a hellish bruise on his side, anyway. If he doesn’t keep quiet, he might end up with a broken rib or something, which would not be ideal.
The bright side is that none of the other hostages have been hit, though. They’re all across the room, huddled together and watching with wide eyes, but, other than being shoved away from their desks and into the corner, they haven’t been touched. Maybe Harley wouldn’t be too bad at this superhero stuff, then. The whole being glad that he’s the one getting hurt so long as no one else is thing seems to be popular with the Avengers, and definitely with Peter. Harley would fit right in on that front.
“Don’t let him move,” Dumb Shoes instructs. “The bomb will be ready in five minutes.”
Harley freezes, heart stuttering. Bomb. They have a bomb. A fucking bomb, and Friday isn’t able to alert anyone about the situation, and—and he has no choice, really, but to press the panic button, after carefully maneuvering his hands into his lap and trying not to be too obvious as the nano tech melts away and reveals the two buttons there. People are in danger, he knows—people could die, people will die if this bomb goes off, and that, he thinks, is a big enough threat to bring in the big guns.
As soon as Pale Bitch happens to avert his eyes, Harley pushes the red button three times, holds his breath and wishes there was a way to know for sure that the alert was sent. Just to be safe, he goes to press the button three more times, if only to help ease his anxiety a bit, but then Pale Bitch lurches, yelps, and he hears Dumb Shoes shout, “Don’t touch that!” in a loud, slightly panicked voice.
And chaos erupts all around him.
“Talk to me, Fri.”
Through the suit and connected to the comms, Friday says, “The device that caused the explosion seems to have malfunctioned and gone off too soon. Due to this malfunction, the device was not fully set up quite yet, and therefore caused a much smaller scale blast than what it would have been otherwise.”
With some kind of huff, Tony asks, “Is that a silver lining?”
“It’s good luck, Boss,” Friday informs him. “At full capacity, the bomb would have caused enough structural damage to possibly make the building collapse and would have resulted in many deaths. As it is, there is very little damage, only contained to the seventy fifth floor. Unfortunately, with my systems within the tower compromised, I am unable to provide a more in depth scan to search for injuries, but my calculations predict that there should be little to no casualties and only minor injuries.”
“Mr. Stark,” Peter says, voice a bit crackly and uneven through the comms. “You have to let me—”
Tony makes a buzzer noise, eyes narrowed despite not being able to see the kid, gaze focused on scanning the building from the outside, where he’s circling it in his suit, to find the best point of entry. “You’re still healing, Pete,” he says firmly. “Stay in the safe room. And get off the comms.”
Surprisingly, Steve speaks up, saying, “Tony, I think he’s ready.”
“Yeah, didn’t ask, Spangles,” Tony sneers, making his way towards a window on the floor above where the blast came from. All the entry points on floor seventy five are compromised, so this will have to do. “You got eyes on the situation yet?”
“Stark,” Steve says, a bit more firm, a no bullshit tone to his voice. “I’ve been training with him every day for the past week and I’ve spoken in depth to Helen about his condition. I’m not saying he should fight, but he has a stealth advantage that none of us have. I can get close enough to hear, but I can’t get close enough to see anything, but Peter can. You need to let him help. It’s the easiest way to know what it looks like in there and if it’s safe to go inside.”
Grinding his teeth, Tony goes to argue, when Sam cuts in to say, “Cap’s right, Tony. There’s too much smoke to get any sort of drone in there to see anything, and all the windows are blocked out, so we can’t even see anything from the outside. We could take the time to come up with another idea, or we can let the kid do his wall crawling thing and let us know what’s going on.”
Again, Tony goes to argue, but then it’s Peter talking, pleading, “Harley’s in there, Mr. Stark. I can’t—I can’t just sit in a safe room and do nothing when I can help. You have to let me help. Please. Please.”
A moment of silence, and then, reluctantly: “Fine. But you’re only going in to look. Nothing else. Deal?”
“Yes,” Peter breathes. “Deal. Thank you.”
“Be safe, kid,” Tony says. “No matter what, just—just be safe.”
It comes down to this:
His best friend, or the kids that absolutely despise him.
The speed in which things escalate are surprising, considering that this, in comparison to other things, is not a very big deal. This isn’t Ultron, or the Accords, or an alien invasion. This is a group of people who hate the Avengers and decided to infiltrate Start Tower just to try and bomb them—a group so significantly unprepared that they accidentally set the bomb off too soon and ruined their own plans.
However, some of these people, they’re angry, they’re furious. One of them, a bigger, bulkier guy with a cut on his forehead that’s dripping blood into his left eye, sneers venomously at anyone who tries to leave the room, shoots a poor intern in the thigh when she tries to run for it, and Peter, who’s managed to go undetected in the corner of the ceiling and is relaying the situation into the comms as quietly as he can, jumps in when the gun goes off, shoves the guy back and webs away his gun and doesn’t have enough time to defend himself when another guy swings at him, knocks him so hard in the temple that he vision blurs and his stomach lurches. Harley is somewhere in the gathering of hostages, but Peter didn’t have time to find him, is only comforted by the simulation of Harley’s heartbeat against his wrist when he double taps the panel of his bracelet to connect them and assure him that Harley’s alive.
There are three bodies, either dead or close to it—the people who were standing closest to the bomb when it went off. None of them are interns and none of them are Harley, so Peter swallows back a lump in his throat and pushes himself to his feet to fight back, but, with his hour and a half training and the punch to the head and the fact that he still isn’t fully healed, his body already feels heavy with the need to rest. Still, he blocks the next hit, fights back with his shaky limbs, ignores the various voices coming through the comms telling him to leave before his body gives out and he can’t fight back anymore.
And it’s going to happen, he knows—his knees are about to buckle, his arms feel like they weight ten tons when he lifts them, his punches don’t land where they’re meant to, and his vision starts to double, but he can’t just stop, can’t run away to nurse his wounds when there’s an intern bleeding from a gun shot wound and various innocent people with their own injuries that need to be attended to. He heals fast, and they don’t. It’s as simple as that, really.
So, he pushes, counts down the seconds until he won’t be able to anymore, and—
Bucky is there.
That’s what they find, when Tony and Steve finally burst into the room, Wanda and Nat and Sam hot on their heels. Spider-Man is a trembling mess of weak limbs on the floor, and Bucky Barnes stands over him protectively, wearing a glare that’s more terrifying than any look he was able to conjure up as the Winter Soldier and directing it at the dozens of guys pointing guns at him.
It comes down to this:
Selfish, or selfless.
Really, Steve has always considered himself selfless, but when it comes to Bucky, he’s as selfish as they come. He turned his back on the Avengers for Bucky. He would do anything for Bucky.
(“You’re so young,” he had told Peter, after their third training session, just a few days ago. Peter had been grinning at his phone as he texted Harley, and Steve was still so unsure of what to think of their relationship, the two of them a mystery in his head. “I’m not trying to judge. I just… I don’t get it.”
“There’s nothing to get,” Peter had responded, a bit dead toned and cold but not exactly seething with anger like he usually would be around Steve. “I’d do anything for him. You can understand that, right?”
And, Steve supposed, he could.)
“I got this,” Bucky tells him, out of breath and struggling as he fights off four guys at once, barely dodges bullets that go flying through the room. Nat and Sam have already managed to usher the hostages out of the room while the bad guys were so focused on Bucky and Peter—save for Harley, who’s leaning against the wall with a sprained ankle and a black eye and a gaze that won’t move away from where Peter is still on the floor, too tired to even stand. Steve thinks Bucky is lying, feels fear clench in his chest when a bullet grazes Bucky’s real arm and blood drips to the floor. Tony is fighting off a handful of other guys, and Sam has his own group, too, and the rest are fighting with Nat and Wanda, who are standing between the weapons and Harley. “I got this,” Bucky says again, when Steve doesn’t move. “Get him, Steve.”
Him. Get him, get him, get—
“Get Peter out of here!” Tony yells, then curses, angrily spits something at the guy who tries to aim a gun in Spider-Man’s direction and grumbles about the fact that Rhodey and Vision just had to take an impromptu trip to DC for a few days and are missing out on all the fun.
“No,” Peter says, not audible over the gunfire and the fighting but clear as day through the comms. He sounds like he’s barely awake, and Steve sees as he tries to get to his feet. “No, I can—I can—”
Bucky steps in front of Peter when someone tries to charge as him, knocks away the guys gun and knocks him out in one forceful swing. “Steve! Get them out of here!”
It comes down to this:
Steve’s heart, or Peter and Harley.
An impossible choice that he only has seconds to make.
“I can—” Peter tries to say again, before his arms give out. “I can—”
And then Steve moves.
In the aftermath, Tony approaches him, an ice pack to his cheek and a wrist brace on, but otherwise unharmed. He’s a little tense and stoic and awkward and he doesn’t look Steve in the eyes, but he says, “Thank you, for… for getting them out of there.” He casts a look over his shoulder, where Peter is conked out and snoring and Harley is leaning his head against Peter’s shoulder, both of them with their scrapes and their bruises clear as day. “They’re stubborn,” Tony says. “Never consider their own safety.”
“I would never let them die,” Steve states, and it’s simple and true and to the point.
“You wanted to stay with Barnes,” Tony points out. He doesn’t look away from Harley and Peter. “I could see it, when I looked over. You wanted to stay with him and make sure he didn’t get hurt, but you left him and helped them instead, and… I won’t lie, Rogers. I thought you’d choose Barnes over anything. You chose him over the team, over the law, over… over everything, before, you know?”
It’s not an exaggeration, and Steve knows this, so he doesn’t try to dispute it, only gives half a shrug and looks at the floor and tries not to move his arm too much, right shoulder still a bit sore from being dislocated and then popped back into place. “They’re good kids,” is all he offers.
Tony looks at him, then, scrutinizing and careful. “Romanov just said the same thing when I thanked her.”
“It’s hard not to think that they’re good kids,” Steve says. “Even if they do hate me.”
“They don’t hate you,” Tony sighs, and, slowly, takes the seat next to Steve, though he doesn’t look fully comfortable with sitting there. “They’ve both lost a lot, and… and, somehow, I got lucky enough to be a constant in their lives, and they seem to want to keep me around, so, knowing what you—what you did in Siberia, knowing that, if Friday hadn’t sent an alert to Pepper when my suit went offline, then I could have… well, they just—they’re protective. And they’re scared, even if they won’t admit it.”
Steve considers this for a long moment, flicks his eyes over to where Bucky is still cleaning up a bloody nose, looks at Harley and Peter, then settles his gaze on Tony. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s not planned, it’s not with a purpose in mind, not with the intentions or hopes of fixing anything. It’s just what he feels, so it’s what he says. “For everything, what I said during the Battle of New York, for how all of us, but especially how I treated you during Ultron, for the Accords. I’m sorry, Tony.”
It looks like Tony didn’t hear him, no reaction in his eyes, on his features, but then he sighs a bit, nods some, and says, “I know. You and Nat, both of you… I know you’re sorry, and I don’t forgive you, I don’t know if I can, but… but I can move on, maybe try to start over. Now that I have a little bit of faith that you won’t put my family in danger, it might be easier to try and… and put a little trust in you again.”
A lump forms in Steve’s throat that he struggles to swallow down, eyes sweeping across the room until he finds Nat, dabbing at her busted lip with some kind of satisfaction shining in her gaze. She smiles at him, the action slight, and nods. Small steps, she mouths to him.
Small steps, he thinks. And maybe some big ones, too.
“You don’t have to pretend you actually trust me because of this,” Steve says. “Just… maybe give me the chance to work for it, so that I can earn it back. Both of us, if that’s okay.”
Tony purses his lips, squints a bit as he glances between Steve and Nat, Steve and Nat, and then he huffs out some kind of airy half laugh and he says, “I think I can do that.”
And it’s not much—it’s not a fix, because this isn’t something that can really be fixed, and it doesn’t change what happened—but it’s something, a slab of cement put down for the foundation of a bridge that needs to be rebuilt. It’s the first real step towards making things better.
It’s more than they deserve, but, as they share another smile from across the room, Steve and Natasha both know that it’s something they’ll work their asses off for.