Chapter Text
Natasha Romanoff was accustomed to wearing faces that didn’t belong to her, but this may have been the most extreme case of such a thing she had done so far.
Of course, she wasn’t worried about being found out until she decided it was time to be found out, because all of her concern was being reserved for her boys and whatever nonsense plan they were conducting on the other side of the Triskelion.
***
“Phase One is underway,” Peter said crouched on the roof of what he was pretty sure was the tallest building in DC. Unless the Washington Monument was taller. How tall was the Washington Monument, anyway? Because free-climbing the side of the Triskelion without his usual suit and parachute was pretty fucked up, so if the Monument was any taller than this that would be majorly--
“Stop talking in that weird spy voice,” Sam cut into his thoughts over the comm unit in his ear. “Is that what you think spies sound like? You watch too many movies.”
“I watch a pretty below average number of movies for my age-group, actually,” Peter pointed out. “What with the moonlighting as the coolest Avenger and all.”
“Coolest?” that was Steve, surprisingly enough. “I don’t remember taking a vote, Queens.”
“Ooh, very democratic republic of you, Captain,” Peter teased. “Now, are you all ready in your positions so I can complete Phase One, or--”
“Stop calling it that--”
“Yes, we’re in position, Spider-Man.”
“Thank you so much, Agent Hill,” Peter said before grabbing a satellite with one hand and snapping it in half. “Phase One is comp--”
“I swear to God would you plea--”
***
“--se let me push? Please? I am-- so ready for this to be over,” Pepper begged, and Tony was thrown off his game if only because he didn’t think he had ever seen Pepper Potts beg.
Even hanging on for dear life from what should have been a fatal drop, Pepper Potts hadn’t begged for anything, had remained steadfast despite her obvious fear. But right now? Bringing their baby into the world? This was going to be the thing that broke her?
“Can she please push?” Tony asked the very over-qualified doctor that he had very nearly bribed into taking on their case. “Please tell me she’s almost there.”
Doctor Riley Hough, OB extraordinaire, gave both of them a sympathetic smile that would have been all Tony needed to know they were out of luck, but she said, “I’m sorry. We’re close, but we’ve got a little bit longer to go yet,” anyway.
She left the two of them alone then, which was both a blessing and a curse, and Tony sat down on the edge of Pepper’s mattress and took her hands in his gently as he looked at her-- glowing and beautiful and so, so sweaty.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked as empathetically as he could without sliding into pitying. (He had already gotten in trouble for that one too many times today.) “Anything you need?”
“I need this baby to get out of my body,” Pepper said with so much insistence and so much, for lack of a better term, fire, that her hands actually flashed a hot orange that forced Tony to pull his away and shake them out with a hiss.
“Okay, totally valid thing to want,” he said as he looked at his palms to assess the damage. “But let’s maybe try not to burn down the Tower or-- give anyone third degree burns in the process.”
Pepper groaned and let her head fall back onto the pillow behind her, hands resting on her belly as they faded back to their usual color-- if still a little flushed pink. (Although, that may have had as much to do with the giving birth thing as it did with the Extremis thing.)
Either way, the sight of Pepper in pain made Tony’s heart sink somewhere deep below his feet, stranded at the base of the Tower where he couldn’t do anything about it the same way he couldn’t do anything about this except hold her hand and offer empty platitudes.
On the other hand, if that was all Tony Stark had to give, then he was going to give his goddamn all.
He leaned in again, a calloused but tender hand resting on her cheek as he pressed a long kiss to her sweaty forehead. And then again, right in succession.
“I love you so much,” he said, pulling away just far enough to glance between her eyes. “I know that doesn’t matter at all right now, but I really do. Just. For the record.”
Pepper breathed out carefully through her nose, releasing just a modicum of tension as she did so.
“It matters a little,” she told him, gentle in a desperately tired way. “I mean, it’s less than twelve percent of my focus at the current moment, but it matters a little.”
Tony grinned at her and kissed her on the forehead one more time.
“I’ll take it.”
***
“I know the road hasn’t exactly been smooth, and some of you would have gladly kicked me out of the car along the way,” Pierce said, holding his glass of champagne aloft. Natasha held hers close to her chest and thought about how a broken glass stem was the exact sort of weapon she’d like to shove through that man’s eye. “But finally we’re here.”
Natasha had gone on every sort of covert mission under the sun, but as she stood there wearing another woman’s face and she felt the sunlight shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Pierce’s office, she was reminded that shit like this always felt different in the light of day-- worse.
Like the people perpetrating the horrors she was trying to stop didn’t even think it was necessary to attempt hiding what they were up to, because they knew they wouldn’t be the ones going down for it even if the whole world found out.
That was Pierce in a nutshell, so confident in his own failsafes that he was planning to commit mass murder while carrying out a toast in a glass box.
“And the world should be grateful,” the man in question said with a smile before lifting his glass to his lips.
Natasha followed suit, not actually drinking any of it out of a habit for self preservation, when a familiar voice sounded over the loudspeakers. Just on time.
“Attention all Shield agents, this is Steve Rogers,” he said, just like they had planned for Phase Two.
(Natasha wasn’t going to justify using Peter’s little naming system to anyone because she didn’t have to, but for herself it was just because it broke the tension.)
“You’ve heard a lot about me in the last few days,” he continued as Natasha’s fellow visitors looked to Pierce with confusion written all over their faces. “Some of you were even ordered to hunt me down. But I think it’s time you know the truth…”
***
“Fuck yeah, it is,” Peter muttered to himself from, what he had to say, was really an excellent hiding spot.
Everyone always doubted his spying abilities, but in Peter’s humble opinion he was pretty damn good at the stealth part of the job, lying in weight amongst the various beams that hung above the main Shield control room.
“...Shield is not what we thought it was,” Steve continued, and Peter watched as confused and concerned agents looked around at each other as though trying to figure out what to do in this situation. “It’s been taken over by Hydra. Alexander Pierce is their leader. The Strike and Insight crews are Hydra as well. I don’t know how many more, but I know they’re in the building.”
Below him, Peter could see the way agents were looking at each other shifting in real time-- from shared looks of worry between friends to internal questions of fear and trust and faith and who to have each for.
“They could be standing right next to you…”
***
Natasha very nearly snorted.
“They almost have what they want. Absolute control,” Steve explained, ever the man you wanted to be giving the speech, whether it was meant to be inspirational or a warning, he was the guy for the job. “They shot Nick Fury--”
Natasha’s grip around her glass tightened imperceptibly to anyone who wasn’t well tuned in on her tells. Clint, for instance, would have noticed, because he was the only one who wouldn’t claim she didn’t have any tells.
“If you launch those helicarriers today, Hydra will be able to kill anyone who stands in their way…”
***
“... Unless we stop them.”
The speakers throughout the control room clicked off as Steve finished his speech, and Peter’s danger sense itched under his new, low-tech black mask as he physically felt the tension in the room below him.
It was distrust made aerosolized, forcing them all to breathe it in as eyes shifted between people who had, up until a minute ago, trusted each other with their own lives.
“I’ve got incoming on the floor,” Peter murmured into his comm, prepping his feet under him and ready to jump as soon as the moment presented itself, because one of the faces Steve had made sure they all knew before they left was striding across the room.
Brock Rumlow.
“Hang back,” Steve ordered in his ear. “We’re on our way to you.”
“He’s just one guy,” Peter insisted. “I can incapacitate him with a fucking-- snap of my fingers, dude.”
“He’s probably not the only guy you’d have to incapacitate in there, kid,” Sam chimed in. “Listen to your Captain and wait for backup.”
Peter smirked to himself. “Thought I was the backup, Wilson,” he said, only for his face and mood to fall back into that buzzing tension as Rumlow approached an agent behind a computer. “Shit.”
“That doesn’t sound good--”
“Queens, tell us what’s happening.”
They were talking down below, Peter shushing the guys in his ear and tuning into his super hearing to listen as Rumlow made orders that the agent in question clearly didn’t want to act on, catching sight of Agent 13(another face he was forced to learn) on the floor as well and thus feeling confident that they at least had one ally down there.
“Tell me you’re close,” he said as orders were refused and guns were drawn. “We’ve got weapons on the floor; I swear I’m about to just go in--”
Sometimes, the spidey sense just warned Peter that something was about to happen and helped his instincts to dodge said thing, but the longer he’d had it (and the more he’d learned to trust it, to use it to all of its advantages) the more sophisticated it had gotten as well.
For instance, as Rumlow dropped his gun, pretending to surrender before he grabbed a knife off of his belt and used it to slice at Agent 13’s forearm, Peter felt like he was watching the whole thing in slow motion. It was as if the combat actually took up more time, giving Peter in turn more of a chance to come up with a plan before he was swinging down from the rafters and slamming a foot into the center of Rumlow’s face before he could pounce on Agent 13.
“What the fu--”
“Oh, hey man,” Peter quipped as he shot a rope of silk at a gun that was pointed at him and pulled it out of the adversary’s hand. “Didn’t have a contingency for that one, huh?”
Rumlow was stalled enough by his now bleeding nose for Agent 13 to get a solid kick into his shins from where she’d ducked on the floor, only for both her and Peter to have to deal with the rain of bullets hailing down on them.
“Spider-Man?” she asked, as she snatched her gun up from where it had fallen in the tussle, poking up over the desk she was using as cover to shoot at a few Hydra agents. “You’re Spider-Man, right? I’m not hallucinating?”
“The one and only,” Peter told her, shooting a web in the direct center of one man’s chest and using the momentum to slam him up against a wall. “You got a name, new friend?”
“Sharon,” she told him, clearly used to high-stakes missions the way she was so alright with having such a basic conversation in the middle of a firefight.
“Nice to meet you, Sharon,” Peter said, just as he saw Rumlow pulling himself up to a computer and quickly typing in a command. “Fuck this guy.”
Peter shot out a web on instinct and pulled the keyboard right out from below Rumlow’s hands, but not before a flashing, red OVERRIDE notification appeared on the screens at the front of the command.
It distracted Peter long enough as he tried to reverse that particular turn of events, only to realize that he needed lengthy codes to which he didn’t have access, that it gave Rumlow the exact window he needed to shoot his way out of the room.
“Dammit,” Peter groused as he continued to fight his way through the room. “Could use that backup right about now, guys!” he called into his comm. “Rumlow set the launch in motion and he’s on the move.”
“Yeah, we’re a little preoccupied now,” Sam told him.
Peter balked. “Preoccupied with what?!”
“The fucking helicarriers that just got launched!”
Oh. Yeah, that would do it.
“Well, f--”
***
“--UCK!”
“Yep, we’re ready,” Doctor Hough, snapping on a pair of gloves and sitting between Pepper's knees, said matter-of-factly, as if Pepper hadn’t felt ready for the past-- however many hours she’d been doing this. “On the next big contraction, you’re going to push. Alright, Pepper?”
“We’re sure I can’t have any of the good drugs?” Pepper asked between lungfuls of air that were really only half-lungfuls the way she was gasping for breaths.
“Unfortunately, we’re just diving in the deep end at this point,” the doctor said sympathetically before looking at Tony. “And I would suggest putting on that suit of yours now.”
Tony frowned, obviously confused in his spot beside her bed which he had refused to leave for more than five minute intervals throughout the whole day. “Why?” he asked.
Doctor Hough smiled softly. “So you can hold her hand, dummy.”
Tony’s face shifted, and so did his entire body language, seeming to realize for the first time that he wouldn’t be able to hold the hand of a woman with enhanced strength while she was giving a natural birth unless he had something to protect himself from broken bones.
“Jarvis, be a dear and send up the right gauntlet,” Tony said before meeting Pepper’s eye with a dopey look on his face. “I’d like very much to hold Miss Potts’ hand now.”
***
When Natasha jumped into action, she realized that there was something else different about her life now, about the missions that she went on and the fights she fought.
Because she helped a man dodge Pierce’s bullet and managed to flip the script so that Pierce himself was the one standing at the other end of her barrel, and as she did so she knew that she was actively revealing herself, even before she pressed a finger to her temple and lifted the holographic mask she’d been hiding behind.
Natasha Romanoff was more than just an anonymous spy these days after all. She was also an Avenger, and that meant using her own identity as a weapon.
“I’m sorry,” she said, smirking at Pierce’s confusion and fear. “Did I step on your moment?”
***
“You know,” Peter said into his comm. “This sucks so bad, but I have to admit it’s just a tad cathartic.”
“Parker--”
“-- No, Sam, listen--”
“-- You’re so distracting--”
“-- Like, yes Shield is toppling and I’m sure there are gonna be repercussions from that or whatever--”
“--Dude, I am begging you--”
“-- But at least we got to punch some Nazis in the meantime, right?”
A beat.
“Y’know what? Fair enough,” Sam said. “Also, while you were blabbering, I replaced the thing on another one of the carriers.”
Peter let out an excited whoop!
“Two down, one to go!” he exclaimed. “Then on to Phase Four, baby!”
“If you ever call me baby again I swear I’ll--”
***
“What is she doing?” one of the Hydra goons in the corner asked as Natasha typed away at Pierce’s personal computer with all of its unrestricted access.
“She’s disabling security protocols,” Pierce said knowingly. “And dumping all of the secrets onto the internet.”
“Including Hydra’s,” Natasha said with a quirk of her brow but without removing her gaze from the task at hand.
“And Shield’s,” Pierce pointed out. “If you do this, none of your past is going to remain hidden.”
This, as generally was the case, Natasha already knew. She knew it and she was scared by it and still she couldn’t shake the image of a twenty-one-year-old boy who had the courage to declare the safety of others more important to him than the security of his own identity.
Granted, the past of Peter Parker had less red marring its pages, but on the other hand, Natasha’s file had significantly fewer people worth protecting within its documents.
Either way, Natasha had made up her mind before she’d even stepped foot in this building.
Pierce continued nonetheless.
“Are you sure you’re ready for the world to see you as you really are?” he prodded, looking for a reaction that she wasn’t going to give him.
Instead, she leveled him with a look.
“Are you?”
***
“Winter Soldier incoming,” Sam said. “I’d stop him but he stole a helicopter and I’m kinda busy dodging-- missiles? Yeah-- full-on missiles.”
“Okay, well,” Peter said, flipping over a pair of Hydra agents, attaching webbing to their backs, and pulling hard. “I guess try not to get hit?”
“...Thanks.”
“Any time.”
***
When Fury arrived in his helicopter (just on time, somehow always just on time), Natasha was just arriving at the step in the encryption where she needed his authorization to continue forward.
She looked at him over the top of her holoscreen, the man come back to life, and found herself questioning all over again what kind of cog she’d been in this entire mess. She had helped Shield, had put her all into helping Shield, and look where that had gotten them.
Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce having a verbal sparring match in a top-floor office while Natasha’s friends fought for not just their own lives but those of thousands on the other end of the Triskelion.
Natasha held a gun to Pierce’s head as they used his retinal scan to get into the system, and she hoped that for once she wasn’t going to have to one day regret the side she had chosen.
***
Peter webbed up four guys in quick succession before knocking down the door to the air traffic control center at the top of the building and coming face to face with Agent Hill’s gun.
“Oh, hey!” Peter threw his hands up. “Here to help.”
Straight face maintained, Hill lowered her weapon and said, “Get over here, we’re at seven minutes ‘til launch and we still need Rogers and Wilson to replace that final drive.”
“Guys, what’s our ETA?” Peter spoke into his comm as he strode across the room to check out the monitor with its countdown and not much else. It was times like this he really wished he could bring Ned along with him on missions.
“Unknown!” Steve replied, loud and frantic and out of breath in a way that told Peter they were far from in the clear.
“What’s the problem?” Peter asked, all business now, knowing that they didn’t have time to worry about morale.
“Barnes,” Sam explained, simple but all-encompassing. “Oh-- Shit-- No, no, no--”
Peter could hear the distinct rushing of wind on the other end of the communicator and his pulse immediately sky-rocketed. It sounded like falling, because Peter certainly knew what falling sounded like.
“Sam!” he called out. “Sam! Come on-- for the love of--”
“I’m fine-- Grounded but fine,” Sam’s voice crackled over what sounded like a partially damaged comm unit. “What about you, Cap?”
“Still on the carrier,” Steve informed them.
A breath of relief.
And then, in true Steve Rogers fashion.
“I got this,” he signed off, before going on to do whatever needed doing.
In the meantime, Hill nudged Peter’s shoulder. “Parker,” she said, nodding to one of the security monitors in front of them. “You want to handle that?”
Peter groaned at the sight of Rumlow making his way down the halls in the distinct direction of Pierce’s office.
“Man. Seriously, fuck this guy,” he groused. And then, into his comm: “Wilson, wanna help me with this Rumlow character?”
“I’d like nothing more,” Sam replied flatly.
“Great. Hill’s gonna give you directions.”
***
Michelle knew that giving birth, especially without any of the wonderful pain relief offered by modern medicine, was a painful thing. She understood that in a theoretical and practical sense, but it also wasn’t as if she’d ever personally experienced it, so when she started hearing Pepper yelling on the other side of her birthing suite’s door, she was a little freaked out.
“Is there really nothing we can do?” she asked, looking to May who sat beside her.
The two of them had moved to the waiting area in the same hall as it was all happening just in case Pepper needed a friendly face during the final, for lack of a better term, stretch.
“You know,” May smiled at her. “I asked exactly the same thing when Mary had Peter?”
Michelle perked up a little bit, never not willing to listen to Parker family legend.
“Yeah?”
May nodded. “I got so worried about her I tried to go into the room and everything, even against Ben’s warnings, only for Mary to scream in my face about how her vagina was not for public consumption!”
The laugh that worked its way out of Michelle’s lungs was jubilant in a way she hadn’t felt all day, what with the underlying nerves that always accompanied a Spider-Man mission. Michelle loved Peter, a fact she had known for a while but which was becoming clearer and more unavoidable each and every passing day, and so by extension she loved his family too.
She was unbelievably grateful to the presence that May had had in her life for as long as she’d known them, but she also felt a pang of loss that she didn’t always feel like she’d earned, simply because she had never even met Ben or Richard or Mary.
Stories like this though, she held onto with an iron grip, despite her own hesitance when she asked, “Could you tell me more? About them?”
May only smiled at her knowingly, took her hand, and nodded.
“Of course.”
***
TRANSFER PREPARED.
It was almost done. It was all almost over, this era of her life and everything it stood for, and Natasha was so ready for it to be so, despite knowing she had one last action to complete.
Full transparency, she thought, looking up at the screen before her. What they needed was full transparency of everything that Shield knew, everything Shield had done, everything Shield was.
Except for one thing, she decided as she searched a single name. One thing that very few would probably notice with the flood of everything else, one name that would go unsearched for in the wake of everything attached to hers.
Spider-Man, she typed with nimble fingers, and then to be safe, Peter Parker.
And then, without a second of hesitation.
Erase all.
***
“Do we know Steve’s situation?” Peter asked, facing outwards into the room with his hands and feet planted against the wall to his back, directly above the door they’d predicted Rumlow to be coming through momentarily. “Why’s he not answering his comm?”
“I think it went offline, or he lost it in the scuffle,” Sam explained. “Either way we’ve lost contact with him.”
“God,” Peter sighed. “I think I finally get how annoying that is.”
Sam rolled his eyes as Peter listened to what was going on on the other side of the wall, felt the vibrations of light footsteps and Rumlow’s voice as he radioed in his location. Peter motioned to Sam to get ready, counting down with his fingers…
Three.
Two.
One--
“Gotcha!” Peter called out as Sam tackled Rumlow the moment he was through the door. Peter was learning a lot about Sam Wilson today, none the least of which was that the guy had guts.
Sam and Rumlow grappled with each other for a moment, and Peter waited until just the right moment to whip a web onto the man’s hand, swinging it as he went so Rumlow’s dominant hand was now stuck to a massive, heavy filing cabinet, effectively immobilizing him.
“What’s wrong?” Peter crossed his arms with a cocky sort of sit in his hip. “Spider got your trigger finger?”
What happened next was concerning, because Peter was pretty well versed in the Villainous Smirk Encyclopedia, and the way Rumlow was looking at him made him take a metaphorical step back, rethinking the previous thirty seconds as he tried to figure out why exactly the guy looked so fucking triumphant.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Spider-Man,” Rumlow sneered, pulling something off of his belt with his free hand and making Sam on instinct put a hand against Peter’s chest as though trying to push him out of the line of fire. “I’m really glad I get to finally show you this.”
And then he flipped open a small vial with his thumb and poured it over the webbing holding him in place.
It dissolved.
Not only that, but it dissolved immediately, like cotton candy in a glass of water, Peter’s incredibly durable, built-to-last webbing just disappeared.
“What the--?” Sam frowned as Peter deadpanned, “Well, I don’t love that.”
“This is gonna hurt,” Rumlow said, stepping forward and taking off his tactical vest for some ungodly reason considering he was one against two. “There are no prisoners in Hydra. Only pain.”
Peter rolled his eyes under his mask, despite the recent revelation that Hydra was figuring out very efficient ways to make his main gig kind of useless.
“Man,” Sam shook his head. “Shut the hell up.”
Peter pointed a vaguely glib thumb in Sam’s direction.
“What he said.”
***
One minute out from launching the helicarriers, from killing innumerable innocent people, and Natasha had somehow gotten herself at the wrong end of a gun again. Or maybe, more accurately, stuck in an electrified ID pin with someone else’s name on it.
Maybe it was some sort of weird karmic retribution for using other people’s names and faces for so many years, but Natasha thought it was probably just shitty luck.
Mostly though, she was wondering what the fuck was taking her boys so long in shutting this thing down? Because they all couldn’t have gotten stuck at the wrong end of a gun, right?
That was the whole point of this team thing, as Natasha understood it, that there was strength in numbers, that even when one of you hit a road block that the others were there to help make up for it.
She was just about ready to lose her entire mind overthinking it, when suddenly, finally, inevitably, the entire Insight system shut down right before her eyes.
That was more like it.
And now, it was time to go.
***
Sam was thrown across the room and through a glass desk, pushing himself slowly back to his feet, and Peter was taking on hand-to-hand with a guy who was significantly better at hand-to-hand than most of the people Peter got into brawls with, when the entire game changed.
Through the window over Rumlow’s shoulder, Peter spotted none other than one of the Insight helicarriers as it fell, burning, out of the sky on a trajectory that aimed it directly at-- well, them.
“Wilson, run!” Peter said, as he kicked Rumlow in the chest hard enough to get out of immediate combat and turned on his heel.
He pulled Sam up off the floor by his bicep and dragged him towards the opposite side of the open floor plan as a big, burning hunk of engine came crashing into the building behind them. Concrete supports crumbled into boulders and dust, raining down on them as they sprinted as fast as they could, Peter’s enhanced strength pulling Sam along faster than an unenhanced human would have been able to go without the assistance of both Spider-Man and adrenaline.
“Please tell me you got that chopper in the air!” Sam yelled into his comm as the helicarrier cut through the Triskelion like butter.
“Where are you?!” Natasha’s voice, a pleasant surprise as Peter hadn’t known she’d even gotten out yet.
“Forty-first floor!” Sam yelled back. “Northwest corner!”
“Nat, you better be fucking hurrying!” Peter added as he dodged a hunk of concrete and pushed Sam out of its path, veering them towards their only available exit.
Peter wasn’t usually all that afraid of heights, he had his web shooters and he knew how to fall without getting hurt. However, he was also usually in a city with buildings that were a whole hell of a lot closer together than they were in this part of DC, the Triskelion existing on its own little stretch of the Potomac and definitely too far for any webs to reach another solid structure.
“We’re on it!” Natasha told them. “Just hold on until we get there!”
“Not gonna be a lot to hold onto for much longer!” Sam quipped, but there was fear in his voice the same way there was fear in Peter’s chest.
They ran, just a few more feet, and Peter grabbed onto Sam with one arm as they smashed through the pane of glass and out into freefall.
One second.
Two seconds.
Two and a half--
Peter caught sight of the helicopter as it came within range and shot out a web that hit its mark on one of the landing gear, yanking at his shoulder socket as both the weight of he and Sam swung with the momentum of the aircraft turning on a dime and taking them away from the explosion.
Peter held on tight, and felt Sam holding on tight to him in return, until their swinging evened out and they were almost steadily hanging from the chopper. Natasha poked her head out and lifted both eyebrows at them in a look of exasperation.
“Having a nice hang out?” she deadpanned, and Peter wished he had a free hand to take off his mask so he could scowl at her.
“Alright,” he groused. “Time to climb up, Wilson.”
Sam made a sound of blatant discontent.
“Climb up? Your fucking webs?” he balked.
“They’re super strong, you’re fine--”
“That guy just dissolved them--”
“Someone dissolved your webs?” Natasha gaped down at them. “That’s kind of concerning.”
“Not helpful, Nat,” Peter called up to her before addressing Sam once more. “I’ll catch you if you slip, but you’re a military guy-- you can climb a rope, dude.”
Sam took a beat and a breath, seeming justifiably less comfortable in the air now that he was without his wings, but eventually bucked up enough to pull himself up Peter’s web and let Natasha help pull him into the helicopter.
Peter followed behind shortly, with a little more grace that had Sam making a disgruntled face at him, before taking a seat beside Natasha and looking to both Fury and Hill at the controls.
“Where’s Cap?” he asked the moment he had his bearings and realized his headcount was one short.
A beat of tense silence filled the cockpit and Peter pulled off his mask so he could look the lot of them in the eye.
“Where is he?”
Another beat, only by Sam’s stern, “Answer the question.”
“He didn’t get off the last helicarrier before it blew.”
Peter’s heart dropped, free falling into the river below them as they zipped past and between flaming parts of a crumbling monument to violence, guilt for anyone who got trapped inside compounding on top of the rest of it.
“We have to find him,” he said. “He would have tried to jump, right? We gotta check the river--”
“We’re working on it,” Fury cut him off. “You think we’re in the business of leaving Captain America to die?”
“No, I just--” he looked at Natasha imploringly, seeing that she understood. “We have to find him.”
“We will,” she told him, certain as that day had been long.
***
He was unconscious on the bank of the Potomac when they found him, shot in the side and with a bloody black eye.
But alive.
They had all made it out alive, and a few hours away in another city filled with more of their people, their numbers were just increased by one.
***
It was late, by the time Natasha was able to get Peter back into his civilian clothes and into the passenger seat of a nondescript car with tinted windows.
She drove the two of them to the hospital, somehow got the whiney mess of a kid to agree to sit in the car so they wouldn’t risk being seen together before the trial that Natasha knew she was going to have to show her face at.
“After all,” she told him flatly. “What would be the point of erasing all mentions of one Peter Parker from the Shield database before leaking it if the press just figure out who you are because of some nosy nurse?”
Peter gaped at her, as slow realization took over his face from the pure exhaustion and exasperation that had been taking top billing before that.
“Natasha…” he exhaled. “Why would you--”
“See you in a minute,” she cut him off, grabbed a file from the backseat, and slipped out of the car, locking it behind her as she strode in through the ER.
***
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty.”
Steve’s face was all messed up in a desperately humanizing way, Natasha noticed, as she stood in the doorway to his hospital room and watched him gingerly push himself up higher in his bed, Sam sitting loyally to his right.
“Hey, yourself,” Steve said. “I thought you were driving Pete back to the jet?”
“In a minute,” she nodded, stepping fully into the room and closing the door behind her. “Wanted to give you something first. Called in a few favors from Kiev.”
She handed over the file in her hands, gently, both because of his current condition and because of the weight held between its pages.
“There’s also a phone number in there,” she said, looking between them. “Pete wants the both of you to know that if you need him he’s around, but he wrote it down himself so it might be completely illegible.”
Sam smirked, breathing out a quiet laugh as he said, “That’s quite the kid, isn’t it?”
“He’s something alright,” Natasha agreed with a smirk of her own in response.
“Thank you for this,” Steve said with all the earnestness of a man with his title, lifting the file and all the weight it carried.
“Just do me a favor?” she suggested. “Don’t disappear into this. It’ll eat you whole if you let it.”
“Yeah,” Steve nodded once. “You too, Romanoff.”
“I’ll do what I like, Rogers,” she said glibly as she made her way back towards the door. “I’ll see you two later. I left a baby in the car and I forgot to crack the window.”
She was chased out of the room by Sam and Steve’s startled laughter.
If she was going to be chased, that was probably her top choice.
***
She wouldn’t talk to him about it, and if Peter hadn’t been as exhausted as he was, he might’ve actually been angry.
But as it were, zipping through the streets of DC in the passenger seat of a car that he was only fifty percent sure Natasha hadn’t stolen, he really was just tired.
Tired and worried.
“I want you to be careful what you say to them,” Peter told her as he got out of her car once they had finally reached the treeline just outside where he had parked the Quinjet going on fourteen hours ago now. “When they question you about all of it, I want you to give me up if you need to. I want you to be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” Natasha responded, standing up from the driver's side and planting one foot on the ground, one in the car as she watched him back away from her slowly towards his destination.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Don’t get yourself thrown in prison, please.”
“They’re not gonna put me in prison,” she told him, as though it was that simple.
“They could,” he insisted in return.
“They’re not gonna put any of us in prison,” Natasha crossed her arms over the top of the car and leaned on them. “You know why?”
Peter laughed at the absurdity of it all. “Yeah, enlighten me.”
“Because they need us, Parker,” she said, almost offhandedly in the way she was already sliding back into the car as she finished, “They need the whole team… Say hi to the new kid for me.”
And with that she was back to speeding off into the night, away from him although probably not for long. Peter was noticing that they always found their way back into each other’s orbits some way and somehow.
He got on the jet.
***
It was late enough at night that the windows had gone black save for the twinkle of city lights. Still, the black was enough that the windows turned into mirrors, reflecting the warm yellow light of the room back at them, reflecting back a worn-out Pepper barely keeping her eyes open and Tony crammed into the bed beside her, little bundle of her in his steady, careful arms.
Michelle felt strange standing there, out of place despite having been invited into the room by Pepper herself, but there was something about having spent two hours talking to May about a young Peter causing trouble for his parents, his aunt and uncle, that was making it difficult to look away from the truly impossibly small child as she blinked up at her smitten father.
“Michelle, you’re hovering,” Pepper teased gently and quietly, the very air in the room feeling as though it was doing what it could not to wake the baby. “Come here-- Tony, let Michelle hold her.”
“Oh-- Oh, no, that’s okay,” Michelle, wide-eyed, stopped her journey across the room halfway and put her hands up. “I can just say hello, we don’t need to--”
“Shut up, Jones,” Tony cut her off with a quiet laugh as he slid off the bed and carried the baby over to her. “You’re gonna love this. How could you not? She’s Pepper’s kid, so she’s perfect.”
And then, before she really got to voice her say in the matter, Michelle was very gingerly holding an hours-old human child in her arms, and looking down at her little face.
She had brown eyes and a few, nearly transparent wisps of strawberry blonde hair poking out from her little yellow cap.
“Oh,” Michelle breathed, as that baby became the only thing in the entire universe, because Michelle was holding her and thus Michelle was responsible for this little, brand new life, and somehow, some way, it wasn’t entirely terrifying. “Hello.”
It was then, although Michelle wasn’t entirely aware of how, that she ended up being led to and sitting in a glider by the window, gently rocking this child that she wasn’t even related to but cared for deeply nonetheless.
She wasn’t even all that close to Pepper and Tony, although that was also probably becoming more and more of a lie with each passing life event that the whole lot of them experienced in tandem, but she was here tucking a blanket tighter around their kid as though it was something natural, as if she hadn’t been the youngest cousin in her own family, the one being held and nurtured and cared for rather than the other way around.
And so a realization hit her, a flip of the script of realizing that she didn’t in any way dislike babies or kids, she just hadn’t spent enough time around them to grow particularly fond of the idea.
After all, if Tony Stark could get his shit together enough to pull off this thing, then Michelle Jones certainly fucking could.
With that moderately overwhelming thought hanging in her head, however, Michelle was pulled out of her quiet little moment by the sound of the door swinging open and Peter skidding to a stop as he caught sight of them all.
“Oh-- Sorry, I didn’t mean to--” he motioned out the door, “They told me to come on in.”
Michelle took stock of him habitually.
One cut eyebrow.
Holding all of his weight on his left leg.
Long sleeves in summertime that pointed towards bruising he didn’t want to worry them about.
Overall, however, still in one piece.
She let out a breath and let herself smile at him as Pepper assured him once, twice, three times that she wanted him to actually come into the room and no I’m not sleeping, it’s okay, Peter.
Finally, eventually, it still took Tony pushing himself off the windowsill where he’d been leaning, looking at the baby over Michelle’s shoulder, so he could grab onto Peter’s arm and drag him across the room.
“Meet my kid, Parker,” he said in what was obviously meant to be a glib way but just sounded giddy. “She’s a knockout already.”
“Oh, yeah?” Peter laughed. “Think she could take me in a fight?”
“Undoubtedly,” Tony deadpanned as Pepper suggested, “Let’s not find out.”
Michelle stood up, holding the baby between them and giving Peter his first chance to meet her, but instead he just looked her right in the eye.
“Still in one piece,” he offered a little sheepishly. “Just like I promised.”
“Did a bit of a number on our nation’s capital though, huh?” she thanked him.
“Yeah,” he heaved a sigh. “I’ll tell you guys about that later. Right now I’m more interested in meeting little baby Paprika,” he grinned, hunching his shoulders to get a closer look at the baby in Michelle’s arms, tugging a little at her meticulously wrapped blanket.
“You have got to stop calling her that,” Tony begged. “I know it’s my fault, but my daughter is not a seasoning.”
“The mother of your daughter is,” Peter pointed out. “Plus, you still haven’t told me her real name, so what’s a guy supposed to do?”
“Here, hold her,” Michelle offered for a myriad of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that her arms were tired and that she may or may not have wanted to see what Peter Parker looked like with a baby in his arms.
“Wait-- Oh--” Peter tried to get out of it the same way Michelle had, only to end up with a baby in his arms moments later. “Oh, okay,” he said softly, something about the tension in his shoulders shifting-- not disappearing, mind you, just adjusting from an awkward hitch up towards his ears into something a bit more like confidence in strength that he could and would be keeping her safe for as long as she was in his care.
“Her name is Morgan,” Pepper said, smiling, all of them smiling in all their various ways as Peter’s very breath went soft. “Morgan Hope.”
“Morgan Hope,” Peter repeated. “That’s a good name, Paprika. Your mom’s a smart lady.”
“I helped,” Tony interjected, only marginally offended at the assumption and seeming to give up on the pet name that clearly wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m gonna teach her so many good jokes,” Peter ignored Tony’s words in favor of making goofy faces at Morgan, who looked more confused than anything.
It made Michelle laugh though, which was only a mistake in the sense that it made him look up at her with a truly dangerous, beaming smile on his face.
And what choice did Michelle have in response to that except to grab the digital camera Tony had been using to take pictures of his newborn, turn it on, and flip it to video as she pointed it at Peter.
“Go on then,” she prodded with a grin of her own. “Show the small fry what you’ve got, Spider-Man.”
Peter Parker will return in…
Age of Acquiescence