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The sky is bigger than Alexis could ever have imagined. He'd thought the sky was a saucer that capped the world, occasionally scudded by clouds or studded by starlight.
It isn't until he's led outside that he realises how wrong he is. That the sky isn't a saucer, but a bowl that covers the earth like a cupped palm. That the sky's colour is the same as he knew, but different, shifting in a gradient all the way down to the band of smudged pollution and the vanishing point where earth and sky appear to meet.
That's an illusion, he knows, but his eyes try to convince him otherwise. He's just used to walls, a definite edge, a set boundary that he cannot pass. The world outside seems to go on forever.
It also crawls with innumerable people, all bustling and jostling past each other. From the top of the Tower, they look like the colony of ants he used to watch on summer days when it was too hot to even feign at play.
That's an illusion, too. Unlike the ants, who had a single-minded purpose, people all seem to drift from task to task with a self-determined aim. Their logic lacks cohesion, their organisation is nothing but barely restrained chaos.
Alexis has known his purpose since the day the doctors pushed him into the playground and he found that he was not alone. There was another boy, a smaller boy, with shaky legs and a small handful of words, a boy who looked much like Alexis looked before his limbs had grown longer and his skin had browned a little in the sun.
Alexis looked at the little boy who toddled from wall to grass to cement, who grinned at Alexis with tiny, sharp teeth and eyes unshadowed by years of tests, of needles, of doctors.
Alexis looked at Luc, and found his purpose.
Protect.
*
The first few days are trouble-free to a degree that complacency sets in. The kids are still running on the everything-is-new-and-hey-no-torture buzz. Children's television and films are a big hit. Ice cream is the discovery of the century, especially once they learn you can buy it with things like gummi candy, chocolate sauce and potato chips already mixed in. A lot of the toys Tony has delivered are confusing to them, but the Lego goes down well, since it's enough like the dexterity testing the Hydra scientists had made them perform, but not so much that it's traumatising. Hydra testing certainly never had little yellow people, or palm trees, or spaceships.
“They need to go to school,” Sam reminds them, as he's watching Brant talk Kris through assembling a Lego building. “They need to get caught up on all the shit they don't know, and they need other kids around them.”
“Pepper's looking into stuff,” Tony says. “Their paperwork needs to come first, because we need that shit to show a school. And a school's gonna wanna know where they are academically, what grade to put them in.”
“Maybe just take them to look at a school. You know, one of those tour things? They have 'em, for parents and kids who are moving into a new area,” Sam suggests.
It goes incredibly poorly.
Though they've taken the kids out of the Tower once or twice for short excursions, this time, it all goes to shit. Some utter douche canoe of a paparazzi spots Tony, and by the time they reach the school, it's like a piranha feeding frenzy.
They somehow get into the grounds, leaving the media outside the perimeter where they can't follow, and arrive just as the bell rings for lunch.
To the already-frightened kids, the doors of the buildings slamming open and hundreds of children flooding the playground is too much. Vincent, Robbie and Connor immediately burst into tears. Many of the others seem either frozen on the spot or determined to crowd behind Tony or Steve's legs for whatever protection they can provide.
It all comes to a head when Simon tries to climb Steve like a tree to get away from a little girl who approaches him, and Alexis, who is practically vibrating with fear and anger by that point, slugs her. The little girl screams like a banshee (which attracts the attention of a teacher) and slugs him back.
“Back on the bus,” Steve decides, and that is that.
The journey back to the Tower is punctuated by the crush and camera flashes of the paparazzi, the helpless sobbing of most of their charges, and the stony, palpable rage of Alexis, who hasn't so much as looked at Steve and Tony since the bus door closed. He has Colin pulled in as close to him as their seatbelts will allow, and he's pointedly ignored the handful of questions Steve's directed his way, stonewalling him with the very tilt of his tightly held shoulders.
*
After plenty of medicinal ice cream, a lot of cuddles, and a mini-marathon of movies, the kids have mostly recovered. Even if they're subdued, the tears have disappeared. Alexis unwound a little when it came to choosing pizza toppings, but he's still sullen, still focussed on the others to the exclusion of the adults.
Tony vanishes halfway through Stuart Little, and reappears when the credits of the Jungle Book are rolling. Half the kids are dozing, and the other half are gravitating back towards the remains of the stack of pizzas.
“So, home-schooling. I've been looking into it, and it's doable. If it's done right, it's possible for it to work, and be good for kids, even as a long term solution. It's not just for religious parents who hate modern society.”
“I was pretty much home-schooled on and off,” Steve admits. “Well, I studied my readers in bed, tried to keep up, so when I got back on my feet, I wouldn't be kept back. Bucky helped. My ma was mainly working, so I had to do it myself. When you're bored enough of staring at the walls, you find the motivation. You're thinking tutors?”
“Nah,” Tony says, waving a hand around. “Nothing so formal, yet. With JARVIS, we should be able to construct a pretty good program, give each of the kids a tablet loaded with apps designed to challenge them in different subjects, and let them learn at their own pace. JARVIS can compile all the results, and we'll be able to tell how they're doing, and who might need extra help or a different approach to certain things. I mean, there are a lot of different learning styles, and some kids have learning difficulties, things like dyslexia, that can sometimes be helped just by giving them coloured glasses, or by changing the backgrounds on things when they're trying to read.”
Steve stares at Tony for a moment, trying to absorb everything that he's just said.
“What?” Tony asks.
“You really thought about this a lot, didn't you?” Steve says.
Tony blinks. “Well, yeah. Of course. I mean, I know they're yours, Cap. I know they're little pieces of you and your buddy from way back when, but that doesn't mean I don't give a shit. I went to boarding school, I hated it. I flew out ahead of everyone around me intellectually, but wasn't allowed to actually study at a pace that suited me, I had to stick with the herd. There are better ways of doing things now, kid-friendly ways, even friendly for kids like ours who've never had a proper playdate in their lives. We tried to throw them in the deep end, since they handled Lilo and Stitch and whipped cream in a can like champs, and we got it really, really wrong.”
Tony states it like someone who's used to cataloguing his faults, but not in the practice of stating them aloud, like it takes a little thought and effort.
“Maybe the way to go from here is gradual desensitisation. A meet and greet with the kids over in the Baxter Building. A field trip to run riot all over the grounds of the Jean Grey School with Logan's latest bunch of X-Men wannabes. Luke and Jessica's baby should be walking by now, and I don't think they'd see a kid that small as a threat.”
Steve nods, already picturing the faces of the kids when they're exposed to the pure, concentrated sunshine that is Dani Cage.
“And sure, if in three months, or six months, or whatever, a bunch of them want to go hang out with their peers, we can do the school thing. But right now, with that introduction? It's gonna be a hard sell, and I'm thinking them trusting us is more important than fast-tracking them to whatever society's idea of normal is, right now.”
Steve looks across the room, at the relative solemnity of tonight, compared to yesterday. “I agree. They're not ready yet. And if there's a way they can study and start to catch up without going through that again, then we should do it.”
“JARVIS is already fabricating the tablets. They should be ready by breakfast. Guaranteed kid-proof, since the prototype was tested by me, and I can break just about anything,” Tony says, with his most charming grin. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you, my cardiac surgeon's in New York tomorrow. Since Bruce is sticking to his guns about it not being his area, this guy is probably our best bet. He doesn't take a lot of paeds patients, but he can assess Robbie and refer him on if he thinks it's above his pay grade. And he took me on as a patient, so grown in a lab shouldn't freak him out too bad. We can run Robbie over in the morning; he cleared his schedule till eleven.”
*
“Well, this could potentially go horribly wrong,” Tony says through a brilliant smile, a week and a half later.
Steve's lips press into a grim line. “We're not trying to take him out of the building, this time,” he says, but he can hear the resignation in his tone, the implicit agreement with Tony's statement. It could, indeed, backfire in a very big way.
Tony winces. “That was a bad scene. I think my ears are still recovering. And I wasn't at the Tower for the worst of it.”
“Clint told me afterwards that the feedback was so horrendous, he turned off his hearing aids,” Steve says.
Tony makes a scoffing noise. “Well, it's all right for some,” he says derisively. “This time, we stay in the building. JARVIS streams it all to this floor in real time, and we've made the room downstairs look like a therapist's waiting area. Beige, soulless, and decorated by Ikea.”
“It's non-threatening,” Steve says.
“It doesn't look like Doctor Frankenstein's lab to a terrified two-year-old, you mean,” Tony says, and shrugs. “We should have gone for décor by Lego.”
“They have enough trouble playing with toys as it is,” Steve argues. “We don't want him to associate toys with medical examinations. Not until he's got more distance from his life in DC.”
“You don't think the big furry blue guy is more likely to be the thing that freaks him out?” Tony points out.
“I showed him a picture of the X-Men last night. He seemed okay,” Steve says, sounding weak even to his own ears.
Tony rolls his eyes. “Seeing a picture is one thing. The guy could be as real as Shrek or Stitch from a picture. Having the enormous lion dude actually in the room, trying to take your temperature? Little bit different. Like all those pictures on the internet of kids crying when they meet Santa or those official cosplayers at Disneyland.”
“Okay, it could go badly,” Steve concedes. “But he won't have had a blue furry guy torture him before, either.”
Tony thinks about that for a second – a very long time for a guy who barely stops to breathe when talking – and nods. “Furry, no clipboard – I've told him JARVIS can take all the notes he needs for him – and no lab coat. Though that last one's gonna be hard for him, I think he might be surgically attached. I think he's sewn into it, like a runway model.”
Steve looks over to where Robbie's sitting on the rug, watching Colin and Connor acting out a scene with Lego people. The flush is high on his cheeks today, and he looks very obviously unwell.
“I hate this,” Steve says around the solid ball of hurt in his gut.
Tony's touch shouldn't be a shock – he's handsy person, whether he's making contact deliberately or just gesturing to prove a point – but it is. It's a steady, gentle squeeze to the top of Steve's shoulder, and it's accompanied by the most startling facet of Tony's truly diverse emotional range – sincerity. “You're doing okay,” Tony says. “And if this backfires, we'll just find another way. Find a doctor willing to go off JARVIS's databanks of biometric recordings, hide a ECG inside a kiddie playtent, give Dummy an x-ray camera.”
“Doctor McCoy has arrived, sir,” JARVIS says smoothly, and Steve and Tony flinch in unison.
“Shit,” Tony mutters. “J, remind me to update your protocols regarding the D-word, for everybody, not just Bruce,” he says, but it's far too late to undo the damage.
“You're not taking him,” spits a voice from behind them.
Alexis is standing between Tony and Steve and the rest of the boys, the boys who aren't playing any more, who are still and silent and watching the whole exchange.
“Alexis...” Steve begins, but Alexis's face just hardens further.
“You said no doctors. You said no tests,” Alexis says.
“I said the doctors would be different, that the tests would be if you needed them,” Steve reminds him.
Alexis shakes his head.
“Robbie needs a doctor, Alexis,” Steve says gently.
“He's fine! There's nothing wrong with him,” Alexis says, his voice quivering slightly.
“You know that's not true,” Steve says.
“He's right,” Tony says. “Take it from me, as a guy who had a bum ticker, who took far too long to get it fixed.” He taps on his sternum lightly with his fingertips. “He needs to see somebody.”
“You lied,” Alexis says. “You tried to take him before. And now you're trying again.”
“He won't even leave the building,” Tony says.
“We never left the building, either, and they still hurt us!” Alexis shouts, and one single tear spills over. He knuckles it away, angrily, and draws himself up taller. “We never left until Yasha found us!”
“You're right,” Steve says. “We did it wrong before. We're trying to do it better, this time. So Robbie gets better, sure, but so you all feel safe.”
“JARVIS, pull up the feed,” Tony murmurs, and in the top right quadrant of the wall, an image of the beige room appears.
“That's where we'll be,” Steve says. “Just Robbie, and me, and Tony, and Mr McCoy from the X-Men.”
“You can come if you like,” Tony interjects. “I can stay here, keep an eye on the rest of the troublemakers, maybe make that slime stuff we saw on the internet to give Steve something to complain about when it gets all over the carpet. And you can go along, take point, and kick Hank and Steve in the nuts and grab Robbie if there's anything that you feel steps over the line.”
Steve swallows down a disapproving comment. There are a lot of innocuous things that Alexis considers over the line, but right now, he looks like he's thinking, rather than gearing up to fly into full-blown, nuclear-meltdown rage mode as he had last time.
“Deal?” Tony asks, holding out a hand.
Alexis, reluctantly, shakes it.
As it happens, the moment the door to the beige room opens and Hank McCoy walks in, Robbie's eyes go enormously wide, and he actually hops down from Steve's lap to hug Hank's leg.
“Oh, my,” Hank says, somewhat discombobulated. “Hello, there.”
“Sulley! Steve, 'Lexis, it's Sulley!” Robbie enthuses.
“We watched Monsters, Inc. last week,” Steve admits. “Tony thought it'd be be therapeutic.”
“He's not Sulley,” Alexis hisses, his eyes still shadowed with suspicion.
“But you're a nice monster, like Sulley, or the 'Bomnible Snowman,” Robbie insists, looking up the long, long distance to Hank's still-startled face. To Hank's credit, he visibly gathers himself, and his mouth curves into a smile. The points of his teeth, where they peek from behind his dark blue lips, look incredibly sharp.
“I can assure you that I am a very nice monster,” Hank declares, placing a hand over his heart, and Robbie's smile lights up the room.
*
“I think he hates us again. Still,” Steve amends. He's in bed, curled up in a soft tee that hugs him comfortingly. On the bedside table, a curl of steam drifts up from the surface of his cocoa into the air. Most modern sweets are too sweet, too artificial, but Steve can't get over how good the organic, single origin cocoa that Tony buys by the shed-load is. It's a decadence he keeps indulging in, whenever he feels down.
“I fuckin' hated all those quacks who stuck you with needles and forced their tonics down your throat, too,” Bucky says. “That one that called you defective, said you should sign up to be castrated, I nearly laid him out right then and there.”
He's resurrected Steve's old laptop and cleared enough of the junk (spyware, malware, whatever that is) off it that it'll run a Skype window without crashing or dissolving the picture into fragmented squares. Because of the new functionality, Steve can clearly see that Bucky is using their face time to clean and reload his growing collection of weapons. One of Steve's nice polishing cloths that he used on his furniture has been re-purposed and soaked in gun oil. Bucky going through the motions of maintenance is so familiar that Steve can almost smell the Black Forest, can almost hear Jones telling Grimm's fairy tales in the dark, the proper old ones from before they were cleaned up by Disney, where the evil stepsisters cut off their toes to try and fit their feet into Cinderella's shoe and were cast out, only to be found frozen in a melting snow bank in the spring.
“But this isn't about sterilisation,” Steve says. “It's about a hole in Robbie's heart, one that needs mending.”
“Then you'll get it mended, and Alexis'll hate you for a while. Robbie's more important than some punk kid fighting for a bunch of screwed-up reasons that are more to do with him than with the kid who's sick.” Bucky slides the bolt back, clears the chambered round with a sharp click. “He'll get over it.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?” Steve asks, because he's really not sure.
“You don't come to me for comfort,” Bucky says, and starts breaking down his rifle.
*
The first birthday that comes around is Vincent's, barely four weeks since the rescue.
Tony, naturally, goes a bit overboard.
There's a mansion in New York that technically belongs to Tony, and the grounds are filled with grass and trees and sunlight. He throws in an enormous jumping castle (big enough for Thor to bounce on, should he wish) a buffet table groaning with all the sugar, salt and artificial colours and flavours a child could want, and a cake as tall as Vincent is, with four tiers covered in red, yellow, green and blue frosting and a Lego man made of fondant on the top.
It's an overwhelming success, with far too much eating and running around and requiring of inhalers and bandaids and the occasional meltdown. Vincent rhapsodises over his small pile of presents (Steve had been firm on that, nothing too extravagant, and a limited amount) and he wears his paper crown all day.
Clint turns up in an outfit of purple spandex that Tony doesn't even have the breath to mock, he's laughing so hard. Clint just gives him the finger, then starts juggling juice boxes, and all the kids gather around to watch. He keeps up a showman's patter the whole time, and recruits Brant and Liam to throw him new items on cue, until he's visibly panting to keep more than half a dozen things off the ground all at once.
“I could throw you my knife,” Natasha says casually.
“No offence, Nat, but fu- futz you,” Clint gasps as he throws the items higher and higher, building up to a crescendo, where he catches the final juice box in his teeth.
“Well, that was a nice warm-up,” Clint says, his smile stunning as the kids cheer. “I'm gonna go do some tumbling on the bouncy castle.”
“Child!” Natasha yells after him.
Half an hour later, they're both coaching a bunch of the kids through somersalts and controlled jumps and falls.
Two kids have held back from the general festivity. Robbie, who's spent most of the warm day sat in Steve's lap in the shade, watching the other kids with obvious envy but resisting any suggestions he could join in, and Alexis, who's hovered around the fringes but never fully engaged, looking lost as to where he fits into the whole scene. When the cake was cut and slices handed around, he made himself busy ensuring everyone got a piece, but then he fell back again. For a child at a birthday party, his demeanour is difficult to read as anything but miserable.
That night, when most of the kids are in exhausted little heaps, pink with too-much sun and far too wound up to go down to sleep without whining, Alexis lingers near Steve until they're alone enough for some level of privacy.
“Robbie should have his heart fixed, so he can play and he isn't tired all the time,” Alexis says in a rush, under his breath, and then he turns around and takes himself to bed, before Steve can recover enough to say a single word.
*
Alexis is alone in the gym. The kids saw it during the first week, but have more or less stayed away until recently. The Lego and the movies and the learning tablets were far more interesting, and the rooms those were in didn't have treadmills, which Alexis himself still can't look at without feeling a cold shiver. Lately, though, Clint and Natasha and Steve have been teaching them how to roll and how to jump and how to walk along a beam and then a rope without falling off. There are no tests and no punishments for failing, and there are nice soft mats all over that Alexis and the others spend more time falling onto deliberately than they do actually doing what the adults are showing them.
Today, he's not falling. He's not tumbling, or walking along a rope, or running and running and running.
Today's the day the doctors are cutting Robbie open and sewing up the little hole in his heart.
They're not cutting much, Mr McCoy explained. They're making very small holes, and poking in tiny robot arms, and sewing everything up again when they're done. Robbie will sleep for a long time, and when he stops feeling tired and sore from the surgery, he'll be able to keep up with the rest of them, so long as he has his inhaler, and he's eaten and drunk and slept enough to make his body happy.
Today is the day that Alexis said yes to, even though every instinct said no, no, no, and even now, his head won't shut up, so he's standing in front of the big hanging bag that Steve hits and punching it with the full force of his fists, tiny, helpless sounds of pain escaping from his lips with every blow.
“You're gonna break your thumb, hittin' like that,” a voice behind him says, casually.
“I don't care,” he says viciously.
“You will if you break it,” comes the amused reply.
Alexis growls and keeps hitting.
“You can't always be there, you know,” the man says. “You can try 'n be, but they're gonna go and get into their own kinda trouble, make their own choices, and they're gonna do it whether you say they should or not.”
Alexis's fingers curl against the bag, his raw knuckles prickling against the fabric.
“Thumb on the outside,” the man says, reaching forward and repositioning Alexis's fingers with his own. “And you gotta push all your weight into it, make that momentum funnel through your fist into your target.”
Alexis's next blow makes the bag wobble more than it had before. He feels the shock right up to his shoulder.
“I tried to always be there for Steve, tried to save him from himself, tried to get him to stay put. And he'd just fight me all the harder, just go and do what I thought he shouldn't to be contrary. And in his place, I don't think I'd do any different,” the man says. “I thought maybe when he grew up big and strong, maybe the tide had changed, maybe he'd be the one saving me. But that isn't the way it works. I think I'll always be lookin' to save him.”
Alexis bunches his fist again, but a lot of the anger has seeped away, leaving him hollow and aching. He leans his forehead against the bag, and watches his breath fog the surface.
“You've all come from bits and pieces of him and me. You're your own people, sure, but you, you're a little bit mine, and I know what it's like to be looking out for someone you suddenly think won't need you any more.”
Alexis can feel his shoulders shaking, can feel the tension building inside him, like a shout or another punch, ready to explode out, so he swallows it down, swallows the lump in his throat that refuses to go away.
“They're always going to need you, but not in the way they did. And that's always going to hurt, but it's what's best for them,” the man says, his voice almost kind, almost apologetic. “You'll always fight for them, but this fight isn't yours to win. It's his. Stand down, Alyosha,” he says.
Yasha's hand comes to rest on Alexis's shoulder, and Alexis turns into him without meaning to. Yasha smells like leather and metal, like chemicals and sweat, and he doesn't sweep Alexis into a hug like Steve does. He just stands there, his hand a steady, unwavering pressure on Alexis's back, until Alexis feels strong enough to pull away.
“I know you still feel like punching things, but you've already messed up your hands from hitting the bag without wraps,” Yasha says, and dips a hand into his clothing. The blade he pulls out is very shiny, and very sharp looking. It flashes in the fluorescent lighting as Yasha flicks it around from hand to hand and between his fingers, flipping it through the air like Clint had done with the juice boxes on Vincent's party day. “You wanna learn how to use this instead?”
Alexis nods, and Yasha leads him to a wall with a paper target with holes in it, a target that he's seen Clint fire arrows into from a bow that folds up small.
“First, you're going to watch. And then, I'm going to show you how to hold it. You won't be throwing it today,” Yasha says with a tiny smile at Alexis's frown of disappointment, “not until I know you can hold it right. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Alexis says.
The thunk of the blades hitting where Yasha means to put them is satisfying, almost as satisfying as the slamming of his fist into the bag had been, and when Alexis gets his grip right, the pleased twist of Yasha's mouth makes Alexis feel something like pride, a warm pulse deep in his chest that doesn't smother the hollow ache, but does make it hurt less, just for a little while.