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It started like this:
“Oh yeah, do you guys wanna hear my story?” Peter called out, swinging from the top of his perch down to the streets below.
Alien robots invading the city. Just a normal Tuesday.
“If we say no, are you going to listen?” Natasha responded flatly over the comms.
“Nope.” Peter popped the ‘p’ as he webbed a robot to the ground. “So you know how I like to fidget with things while I’m thinking?”
“No, but carry on.”
“So I was in shop class, right?” Peter started, still swinging around and webbing up robots as he went. “And usually I bring my own tech from dumpster diving to fiddle with because they have such boring pickings in the classroom. So I brought this old phone I found, but apparently the kid next to me had the same phone and I accidentally disassembled his instead of the one I brought," Peter explained grandly. “He was not a fan of that, and neither was the teacher. I got detention, which was so lame because I put it back together and it was totally fine!”
“I fail to see how this has any relevance to the situation at hand, kid,” Tony sighed, and Peter tilted his head to watch as the Iron Man suit flew by overhead.
Peter considered it for a moment, coming to a rest on a wall and tilting his head the other direction. “It doesn’t,” he chirped. “But I was looking at the robots and it reminded me.”
“The invading alien robots reminded you of fidget toys?” Clint asked, sounding like he was trying not to laugh.
“They would be interesting to take apart,” Tony mused, the sound of his repulsor discharging echoing over the comms.
“See?” Peter gestured in his mentor’s direction, even though they were nowhere near each other and nobody was looking at him to see it. “Someone understands me.”
“When that ‘someone’ is Tony Stark, you should generally fear for your mental sanity.” Natasha slid back into the conversation, tone as unhurried and casual as ever. If Peter didn’t know better, he’d assume she were taking a stroll in the park, not fighting robots.
“I heard that.”
“Good,” she responded, tone smooth and silky. “I intended for you to.”
They lapsed into a momentary lull of silence after that, falling into their usual fighting routine. Clint and Natasha were paired up, along with Steve and Tony. In other words, the fliers paired with the non-fliers. (Clint couldn’t really fly, but he had grappling hook arrows— and Natasha had similar wrist rappellers, so it was generally agreed that they could hold their own.)
And then, of course, there was Peter— swinging around the perimeter, helping civilians, and kicking robot ass as a one-man team. He had been informed by multiple members of the team that he kept up such a steady flow of commentary that he didn’t need a partner. Obviously, he had to live up to expectations, so he started chattering again.
“Easy, buddy.” Peter put a hand out— trying to stop the semi-sentient robot approaching him— as if he were attempting to tame a particularly feral cat. “We don't have to fight.”
The robot charged before he could say another word.
“ Oooh- kay, now we have to fight.” Peter leapt fluidly out of the way. He heard a snort of amusement over the comms, and he easily webbed the robot to a nearby building. Just then, his Spidey-sense tingled, and his head shot up and over to the direction it was warning him about— where another wave of robots was moving towards them, in a creepy synchronized fashion.
Seriously, where were they even coming from?
“Huh. Well that’s unexpected,” Peter said, staring up at the new influx flooding the streets.
“I think you mean uninvited.” Tony spoke up through the comms, and Peter could see the figure of the Iron Man suit lifting Cap under his arms and rocketing them both over to the new wave of enemies.
“They’re not mutually exclusive,” Peter pointed out, making his way towards them and roundhouse kicking a robot out of his way.
“Eh, but one’s a better descriptor.” Tony’s voice sounded tinny through the comms as he twisted and turned from his vantage point in the sky. “Mine, to be clear. Less verbose.”
“Two adjectives don’t even qualify as coming anywhere near verbose,” Peter protested. “Also,
you
of all people have absolutely no right to be talking about using less words.” In all fairness, neither did Peter himself, but
he
wasn’t the one criticizing here.
“Unforeseen. Unanticipated. Unplanned. Unpredicted. Unwanted. Unsolicited. Unwelcome—”
“You’re a real douchebag sometimes, y’know?” Peter interrupted Tony with no real heat in his tone, flipping onto the shoulders of one of the robots and tearing its head off.
“Only sometimes? I'm slipping. Used to be far more than that,” his mentor responded, a sly grin evident even through his voice.
“Keep it up and you might regain your ranking,” Peter shot back wryly. “Also, you totally had FRIDAY feeding you those synonyms.”
Tony made an affronted squawking sound. “I am a genius with an IQ of 270 who built the Iron Man suit from scraps in a cave, do you really think I need my AI to—”
“Indeed, Boss asked me for synonyms,” FRIDAY chimed in over the comms, sounding smug.
“Snitch.”
“If you boys are quite done imitating a thesaurus, we could use your help over here,” Natasha interrupted, with her usual mix of sly amusement and exasperation, paired with the slightest bit of breathlessness. Peter’s head turned in her direction, and he spotted her and Clint perched on top of a building, trying their best to hold off the horde of robots rapidly encroaching on their position.
“Be there in a sec,” Peter chirped, slinging his way over to them rapidly. The concentration of robo-enemies was much higher here than in other areas, and he found himself releasing copious numbers of web grenades to catch as many of the buggers in one fell swoop as he could. It was a sound strategy, if he did say so himself— far better than going hand-to-hand with each bot. Not that they were particularly difficult to crush or shut down, but there were so many of them.
Luckily, the wave of bots started to thin out at some point, after what felt like an endless period of time.
“You have just run out of web-fluid,” Karen piped up. “If you do not replace your cartridges soon or move from the top of this building to solid ground, your chances of survival drop by a concerning sixty-three percent in the event of a fall.”
“You're a real Debbie Downer sometimes, you know that?” Peter said, even as he popped the old cartridges out and replaced them with new ones.
“I am unfamiliar with that term, Peter,” she informed him kindly. His jaw dropped.
“Well now I feel old,” he declared melodramatically. “I'm fifteen, and you made me feel old .”
“Imagine how I feel whenever you open your mouth,” Tony grumbled, and Peter realized his comms were still open to the rest of the Avengers.
“Ha,” Clint crowed. “Imagine how Steve feels.”
The aforementioned man sighed. “Can you all focus, please?”
They did not.
Karen piped up again. “In all fairness, Peter, I am only a year old.”
“Wow, a year old and speaking full grammatical sentences already,'' Peter praised. “You’re a child prodigy, K.”
“Well if it’s a competition , FRIDAY spoke full grammatical sentences from birth.” Tony's smug tone cut through the comms once more.
“I'm pretty sure this counts as child favoritism, Tony,” Peter pointed out. “Given that you created both of them.”
The man scoffed. “Karen is more your child than she is mine,” he huffed, sounding a little miffed by that fact. “You’ve taught her too many of your ridiculous meme things.”
“Your age really showed with that one,” Clint commented unhelpfully.
“Didn’t beat the teen pregnancy allegations,” Peter said at the same time, in a mournful tone. “Not that there’s anything wrong with teen pregnancies—” There was a choking sound from the comms, cutting him off.
“What the hell , Peter,” Tony said, voice all-too-loud in the earpiece. Peter didn’t point out that the man had broken protocol by not calling him by his alter-ego’s name in the field.
“You just said Karen is my child,” Peter pointed out instead, tone perfectly innocent. “I'm fifteen.” He shot another web. “Hence, teen pregnancy. You’re catching on awfully slowly for someone who’s supposed to be a genius.” There was a beat of baffled silence, like nobody quite knew what to say to that. Peter loved when that happened.
“I take it back,” Tony said flatly. “You’re not ready for parenthood.” Peter, for his part, had to agree with him wholeheartedly on that one.
“Yeah, you gotta take it back,” Clint agreed, and everyone could hear the shit-eating tone in his voice as he continued. “Tony can’t handle being a grandfather already.”
There was another suspicious choking sound. Peter hummed thoughtfully.
“I don't know, he has the gray hair for it,” he mused, tapping his chin and leaning over the sides of one of the buildings.
“Forget I said anything.”
Natasha spoke once more, tone wrought with dry amusement. “Oh trust me, Stark, we try every day.”
—
In the end, the battle— if it could even be called that— was relatively anticlimactic. There was no mad scientist at the center of it all, no evil villain shouting a vendetta from the rooftops, no dramatic final stand. Someone had obviously sent them, but whoever it was either didn’t care enough to show their face or was planning something worse. Peter, personally, was hoping for the former.
The team had gathered back at the Quinjet, dusty and with a few minor scrapes but mostly unharmed otherwise. Tony made a beeline straight for Peter, flipping up his faceplate and giving the Spider-Man suit a once-over, checking for any injuries. Peter rolled his eyes slightly, but held his arms up and did a quick spin on his heels, well-used to this particular routine by now. His mentor nodded, satisfied, the furrow in his brow smoothing out ever so slightly. Peter pretended to be outwardly exasperated by their usual dance— a habit Tony had picked up ever since his early days, when Peter would stubbornly hide life-threatening injuries from the team. It had morphed since then, though— moving away from actual annoyance at not being trusted into a fond kind of warmth at the show of what he knew was concern.
The rest of the Avengers did similar checks of their own partners and each other, ensuring instinctively that they were all fine and not on the verge of dying, before finally relaxing. Clint leaned over and shoved a toe under one of the webbed-up alien robot things, halfheartedly lifting it off the ground.
“So did we ever actually figure out what the deal with these things were?” he asked. “Other than the usual pathetic attempt at world domination?”
Peter shrugged, a response in and of itself, and Clint sighed, slinging his bow over his shoulder and making his way towards the Quinjet ramp.
“I call dibs on first shower,” he called out over his shoulder.
“We all have personal showers, idiot.” Natasha said, following him up the ramp and leaving just Steve, Tony, and Peter outside— standing beside little piles of robot scraps.
The only ones remaining un-pulverized were the ones that Peter had webbed up, and he took a kind of personal satisfaction in that fact when Steve complimented him for keeping them intact to study. They all scooped a robot up and dragged them inside the Quinjet, already spotting the SHIELD cleaning crew touching down a block away. (Peter did not envy their job.)
“Maybe we’ll be able to get some information about who sent them,” Steve commented once they were inside, staring down his nose at one of the robots as Tony poked at it with a gauntlet.
“I call first dibs on dissecting,” Peter said, leaning down to mirror his mentor’s position, squinting at an exposed patch of circuitry. He pulled his mask off and ruffled his hair now that they were inside the privacy of the jet.
“Nuh-uh— not you, junior, not until we figure out if they’re still dangerous or not.” Tony corrected, jabbing a finger at Peter’s sternum, right where the spider emblem sat.
Peter just rolled his eyes, not bothering to verbally argue. He knew full well his mentor would forget about any rules he set within about three days of creating them. Tony also frequently forgot about what he did or didn’t have in his workshop at all times— even alien robots.
The number of times Peter had heard him asking FRIDAY “what the hell is this” or “how did this get in here” was… mildly concerning, actually. Peter knew for sure that Tony wouldn’t miss him fiddling with a few random alien robots. Besides, his Spidey-sense wasn’t going off around the now-inanimate objects, so he figured they were perfectly safe at this point to disassemble.
“You know, letting me fight them in a battle but not letting me disassemble them in a lab is mildly hypocritical. Most people would consider the lab far less dangerous,” Peter commented.
Tony scowled in the annoyed manner he always used when Peter brought up a good point that he couldn’t immediately refute. “We didn’t know if the threat was big enough to necessitate the entire team— including Spider-Man— at first.” He sniffed haughtily. “Evidently it is not, so it's an unnecessary risk to expose you in the lab as well.”
Clint cleared his throat from across the jet. “ Cough — helicopter parent— cough, ” he muttered, before fanning a hand melodramatically in front of his face, teeth flashing in a shit-eating grin. “Man, it’s dusty in here. Don’t know what got caught in my throat.”
Tony glared daggers at the archer, who had an alarming— and frankly incredible— lack of any marketable self-preservation skills. Luckily, Steve saved Peter from potentially witnessing a bloody murder scene play out in front of his very eyes— poking his head in from where he was seated in the cockpit, eyes scanning over the small group.
“Mission debrief when we get back, ten minutes.”
~ ~ ~
Peter hated mission debriefs. Seriously, if someone had told him just how much sitting around— and paperwork — he’d have to deal with when involving himself with the Avengers, he probably would have stayed well enough away.
As it were, he was stuck now, fingers tapping against the armrest of the chair he was sitting in, desperately wishing he had something to do with his hands. Usually he’d default to disassembling and reassembling his web-shooters, but they were on a pile in the middle of the table, along with a few of the other Avengers’ weapons— including Clint’s arrows, one of Tony’s busted gauntlets, one of Natasha’s guns, and Steve’s shield perched on top of each other. It had become a rule during their debriefs— ever since the Great Debrief Disaster. (Peter almost shuddered to think of it.)
In summary: they didn’t hold their weapons anymore during the debrief sessions. Peter griped a little bit about the fact that his web-shooters were included in that, given that they were hardly really weapons , but Steve had insisted he be included. For solidarity, or something like that. And when faced with the full moral righteousness of Captain America, well— people tended to listen. Not to mention, Peter had played far too many pranks with his webbing for anyone to consider it as innocent.
So— he was tragically, incredibly, horrifically bored.
He started mentally doing his next homework assignment in his mind, tilting his head back so that the base of his skull rested against the chair’s headrest. His fingers twitched involuntarily, aching for a pencil and paper or something to scribble his thoughts down on, but he worked his way methodically through the homework problems in his mind regardless. In the background, he could hear the voices of his teammates— mostly Steve, along with Nick Fury, and the occasional (or not so occasional) interjection from Clint or Tony.
If Peter had to hear Steve explain any more to Nick Fury in excruciating detail about their team plan, how they’d executed said team plan, what their strengths and weaknesses were on the (yes, again) team plan, he was going to—
Peter squinted. Silence. That was odd.
He lolled his head around, noticing the way the entire team had stopped talking and were now staring at him.
“What?” Peter frowned as he spoke, shifting slightly. He was still half-occupied with the thought of the alien robots and his homework and how incredibly boring debriefs were, so it was only when everyone moved back almost in tandem that he fully went still. “What’s wrong?”
“Well, for starters, maybe put down the gun,” Tony said, in a strange, taut kind of tone. Peter looked down at his hands, and realized that— in all of the boring, boring talking— he had somehow managed to inch his way towards the weapons pile in the middle of the table and grab one of them without anyone realizing. (Himself included.)
His apparent unconscious fidget toy of choice? One of Natasha’s guns. He’d been midway through cleaning and reassembling it without realizing, and his cheeks went red at the thought that he’d been meddling with the Black Widow’s gun without permission. Rapidly, he snapped the nozzle back in place with fluid ease, and slid it back across the table towards her, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Hm,” she commented noncommittally, inspecting the barrel of the unloaded gun. Peter half-expected for her to reload it and shoot him point-blank in the skull. (Not really , but he could never really tell with her.)
“This is cleaner than it’s been in a while,” she said, instead, shooting him an appraising glance.
Peter’s cheeks went pink again, and he waved the shirt he was using as a rag half-heartedly. “You’re welcome?” he responded, watching as the corner of her mouth tugged up in a smirk.
“Did you seriously just disassemble a gun with military-grade precision?” Tony asked, peering at him with an expression torn between impressed and mildly disturbed.
“… no?” Peter responded hesitantly, because there were only two answers he could give and he wasn’t really sure which one was the correct answer in this predicament.
Tony arched an eyebrow. Okay, not the correct answer then.
“Yes?” he tried again, much more confident this time, because if he had a fifty-fifty chance the first time around and it was wrong, that meant he had a hundred percent chance now.
Tony's eyebrow arched even higher still.
It now occurred to Peter— too late, of course— that his simplistic prediction model did not take into account other variables. Drat.
Peter threw up his hands and grumbled. “Whatever. Stop looking at me like that.”
“Where the hell did you learn how to disassemble a gun like that?” Clint interrupted, squinting at him. “You’re a teenager.” He jabbed a pointer finger in Peter’s direction. “You’d better not also be some kind of super-secret-spider-spy.”
Peter’s eyebrows furrowed, a little perplexed as to why this was so much of a surprise to them when he also happened to be a super-powered teenager who could stop buses and flung himself off buildings on a daily basis. Really, he didn’t think this was the strangest part about him.
“My uncle was a police officer,” he pointed out. “And I was a nosy, fidgety child. He let me clean and reassemble his weapons all the time as long as the ammo was completely locked out of reach. It was a good distraction.”
There was another beat of silence, and the expressions around him ranged from amused, impressed, concerned— or, a mix of all three.
“Well in that case,” Clint started with a sly grin. “How do you feel about cleaning my weapons?”
Natasha cuffed him over the back of his head and he yelped, rubbing the sore spot and shooting her a half-hearted glare. “Ignore him,” she said sweetly to Peter. “He doesn’t need more of an excuse to be lazy.”
“Hey!” the archer squawked.
Tony squinted at him. “So…” he trailed off, eyes flicking between Peter and Natasha. “Do you usually have a gun laying around to disassemble as your personal fidget toy?”
Peter snorted, then shrugged. “No. Fifteen year olds are not licensed to have guns in New York City,” he commented flatly. “Usually I fiddle with my web-shooters, but,” he pointed half-heartedly towards the pile of weapons. “Clearly that wasn’t an option. I guess I just picked up the next best one.”
Fury arched his eyebrows high, reminding Peter of his presence in the room. “And you didn’t notice you had picked up a gun ?” he asked, skeptically. Peter shrugged.
“If I’ve fiddled with something familiar before, then no, it’s kind of an unconscious thing,” he defended himself, ticking a list of objects off on his fingers. “My web-shooters, guns, any tech that I’ve disassembled before…” he shrugged again. “My senses know that it’s familiar and won’t hurt me, so I just go on autopilot.”
“Hm,” Fury made a sound deep in his throat.
“So what I’m hearing,” Clint started, with all the air of someone speaking an unwelcome opinion into the room. (In other words, his usual tone.) “Is that you have the attention span of a toddler.”
Peter squinted, considered it, then shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”
“I’m going to have to build you one of your own fidget toys so you don’t give me a heart attack next time.” Tony grumbled from beside him. Peter shot him a wide, toothy grin.
“I’ll need a rotation or else I’ll get bored,” he warned, before leaning back to glance over at Fury. “Are we done with this, by the way?” He waved a finger towards the table, with all of them still sitting here.
Nick Fury sighed, and pinched his brow in between his fingers.
“You’re all dismissed,” he said, as if this situation were causing him some great exasperation, even though he was literally the one who orchestrated them. “Debrief is over.”
Thank god .
~ ~ ~
Robots. Again.
The same ones from before, actually, except this time modified— with what was clearly stolen Stark Tech.
Man, the SHIELD cleanup crew was going to kill them.
“This is giving me the craziest sense of deja vu,” Peter called out, swinging down from the top of the building. “Do you guys feel that? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure we just dealt with this, like, last week.”
“These ones are modified,” Steve noted, not responding to Peter’s sarcasm.
“Yeah,” Tony grumbled, sounding sour. “With my stuff. Talk about a kick in the teeth.”
“At least that means you’ll have an advantage in knowing their circuitry when you disassemble them?” Peter suggested, trying to be optimistic here as he used his momentum to knock down an entire line of bots. They fell like dominoes. Or bowling pins. More like bowling pins, actually, given the way they sprawled everywhere.
“I thought we already established that alien robots aren’t fidget toys,” Natasha pointed out, and Peter could see the shock of her red hair down the street, standing out harshly against the dusty gray of the pavement— Clint’s light blonde hair popping up right next to her.
“Well, these aren’t really fully alien anymore, they’ve been modified with Tony’s tech,” Peter pointed out, despite the fact that they had already established that fact. “Actually, that reminds me of a story—”
Before he could finish, there was a large commotion, and a few very colorful swears echoed through the comm that Peter elected not to repeat— for Karen’s innocent ears, of course.
“These are more advanced than last time,” Steve grunted, and the sound of vibranium meeting metal-robot-exoskeleton echoed through the comms. “They’re more reinforced. Smarter. They move in formation.”
“No shit, Cap,” Tony said, and Peter heard a loud clang and another colorful string of swear words. “Are you fucking —”
“Language,” Clint drawled, to his own great amusement, and Steve grunted out a half-sigh, half-groan.
“Not the time.”
“They’re learning,” Natasha interjected. “Whatever we faced last time— they’ve gotten better. The same tactics aren’t working.”
“There are too many of them,” Tony pointed out, firing another repulsor blast. “They take longer to take out this time— doable, but there just aren’t enough of us compared to them.”
“How about we try and deactivate them?” Peter suggested, smashing two robots into each other and watching as five more took their place. “You said they were moving in formation— there’s got to be some sort of communication point.”
“Yeah, but where is the question,” Tony pointed out.
Peter narrowed his eyes consideringly. Against his mentor’s earlier prior wishes, he had, in fact, found a way to fiddle with the robots they’d collected before—- disassembling and reassembling them out of habit. Their circuitry was actually pretty simple, and it made for an easy, soothing motion. He hadn’t looked at the wiring of the new bots yet, but he assumed it was probably similar— it felt stupid to do a test run with one type of robot and then do a second round with a completely different type. It was far more likely that they were just modified to be better. If he could just get a few seconds with one of them…
“Tony, I think I can see a spot that may be the deactivation point. We need to disrupt the network. Can you get to it?” Steve ordered, voice loud. Peter had already nabbed one of the robots by this point, dragging it up unwillingly to a relatively secluded rooftop. As suspected, the circuitry was nearly identical to the last round of bots, and his fingers easily made quick work of the casing and initial wiring.
“No need, I can do it,” he said over the comms, even though he’d already been elbow-deep into one of the robot’s guts long before the order from Steve came through.
“Pete—” Tony started, tone taut.
“Spider-Man, this is modified with Stark Tech, you should let Tony do it—” Steve started in tandem, in his usual authoritative tone, but Peter interrupted before the man could even finish his sentence.
“Already got it,” he said triumphantly, pressing a button that was new (compared to the last round of bots) and blinking red; practically screaming ‘look at me!!! press me!!!!’
(It occurred to him later that that could have been an explosive button, not a deactivation one, but his Spidey-sense hadn’t loudly protested against him pressing it. Plus— whoever sent these bots didn’t seem bright enough for that particular level of trickery.)
He could hear the sound of all the robots deactivating at once, and the sudden, stunned silence over the comms.
“Did he really just…” Clint started.
“Yeah,” Tony said, tiredly. “He did.”
“So anyways,'' Peter chirped, as if nothing had happened. “Like I was saying earlier, about my story—”
There was an immediate, unified chorus of responses from the entire team over the earpiece.
“
Don’t.
”