Chapter Text
Harley
“What the fuck is going on?” Harley whispered, burying his face in his hands.
A single hysterical laugh bubbled his way through his throat, and he took a deep breath in an attempt to fortify himself before facing the scene around him.
He was in his bathroom, or, more accurately, what used to be his bathroom.
The sink basin was cracked through, and the handle had been ripped clean off. The faucet was spraying water over every surface, including Harley himself. The doorknob was crumpled within Harley’s grip.
“I think I’m hallucinating,” Harley decided, dropping the door handle in the tub with a resounding clank. A memory of his first time trying caffeine came back to him, the delusions and anxiety that followed his first espresso shot. This was like that, he decided, only a thousand times more intense.
He stepped out of the bathroom in a daze, ignoring the water that soaked into his socks. He almost smacked directly into Peter, who had happened to be lounging on his bed, waiting for Harley to finish brushing his teeth so that they could get a start on movie night.
“Dude, I think we should see —Woah! Did you fall in or something? You’re soaking wet!”
Harley wanted to bury his face in his hands. He also wanted to reach out to Peter, to hold on to him and ask him what the hell was going on, but a part of him was afraid to accidentally crush him with his newfound strength.
Instead, he said, “I think there’s something going on.”
Before they could discuss it, FRIDAY’s voice sounded.
“Mister Keener, I would like to inform you that you have a phone call.”
Harley didn’t give it much thought and said, “Pick it up for me, Fri.”
The A.I. paused, sounding almost hesitant, “I think it would be best if you handled this one yourself, sir.”
And she was right.
Harley plucked his phone from his pocket, careful not to shatter it, and glanced at the caller's I.D.
Ariel.
FRIDAY never fielded her calls. It was one of Harley’s express instructions because he knew how much Peter and Tony loved to talk with his family.
He picked up the phone.
An hour later, Harley was on a plane back to Tennessee.
---------------
*Eleven Months, 14 Days, 7 Hours Later*
A knock rang through Harley’s house, a swift and resounding rap rap rap that couldn’t be ignored. He fucking tried, not in the mood to get up from his place on the couch, not wanting anyone to see his disheveled state and tired eyes. But hell, whoever was at the door was persistent, so Harley stood. He stretched, arms out and fingers wiggling slightly as he shook the ache from his joins.
When Harley actually opened his front door, he had to work at it, shoving the warped wood open with his hip.
And fuck.
Peter was there. He was standing there in Harley’s maroon sweater, the one that Harley had been sure he’d lost, looking utterly delighted to see him. Harley resisted the urge to slam the door in his face. As soon as his eyes met Harley’s he started talking.
“Harley, thank god. You have to let me in, like, right now. It’s important,” Peter declared, bending down on one knee to untie his shoelaces. The sleeves of the sweater fell down over his hands as he did so, and Peter pushed the fabric back, revealing a nasty scrape on his left forearm. Harley stared at it, wondering which patrol he’d picked it up from. Harley used to be there for every cut, scrape, and bruise.
Not these days.
“Peter, what are you doing here?”
Peter paused for a moment to look up at Harley, gaze scrutinizing. It took him a long moment to respond.
“Visiting you, obviously.” His head tipped downwards again as he resumed his earlier mission to remove his Vans as quickly as possible. He was wearing a pair of high tops that Harley had never seen before. Evidently, much had changed in the past year, including Peter becoming a sweater-stealing thief. Harley didn’t think they had the time to stand around and wait for Peter to take his shoes off, so he did the only logical thing.
“Come on,” was all the warning he gave before he grabbed Peter by the bicep and started bodily dragging him across the threshold. He didn’t stop before they reached the living room, hauling Peter up and shoving him back onto the couch with enough force that the springs made a horrible squawky groan noise. Peter went right back to untieing his shoes as if nothing had happened. Like he hadn’t shown up on Harley’s doorstep with no warning right before Harley’s dad came home.
Like he wasn’t hundreds of miles from home, actively causing Tony’s hair to go grey.
Peter seemed to give up on getting his shoes off, settling for swinging his legs over the arm of the couch so he could kick his feet. He pulled his hands inside the sleeves of Harley’s sweater and folded his hands around his knees, looking incredibly small. The first time he’d seen him since last summer, and he had the audacity to look that adorable while wearing Harley’s clothes. Sickening. Gross. How dare he?
“I repeat,” Harley said, “what, in God’s damn name, are you doing here, Petey-pie, because there had better be a good reason.”
“There is, but I can’t tell you what it is.”
Harley flopped down into the adjacent armchair and let out a groan not dissimilar to the one the couch had made.
“Tell me,” He wasn’t begging. He wasn’t.
“Like I just said, I actually cannot.”
“Weenie,” Harley glared at him.
Peter swallowed. Thought for a moment.
“Weenie Supreme,” then, “I cannot give up my reasons.”
Harley stood, running a hand through his hair.
“Peter,” he turned, “tell me, because if you don’t, I will have to make something up and it’d better be believable, because my dad is here , and he will kill us both if he finds you here.”
Peter’s expression turned concerned, then angry, then downright murderous at a speed that would have been comical in any other situation. He schooled it into something only slightly less dangerous, then opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again to say, “Your dad is back ?”
The incredulity in his tone was what made Harley want to scream. This is why he hadn’t told anyone. No one could understand. They would just look at him with that sad-and-pitying face that Peter was currently making.
“He is back, unfortunately. And he found out about Tony applying for guardianship of me, somehow. He,” Harley laughs a cold, humorless laugh, “got
so
pissed. Wouldn’t stop screaming. Nearly threw me out, I swear.”
Peter’s eyes went wide.
“Harley,” he said.
Harley held a hand up and Peter closed his mouth. He needed to hear this.
“He took my phone, at first he just had it in his room, but he smashed it after a while. Forced me to withdraw my application to Midtown too, the fucker. That’s why I couldn’t come to New York this summer, I haven’t been texting you, and I haven’t seen you for months.”
Peter looked ready to commit murder. His hands were twitching, like he was trying to use his web shooters but knew he couldn’t. Suddenly, visibly, a thought came to his mind and Peter’s face fell, mouth turned down at the corners, eyes dark, the whole shebang.
Harley knew what he was going to ask before he even opened his mouth.
“He, he hasn’t hurt you, Harls, right?”
Harley couldn’t look at him.
“ Harley .”
Harley rubbed his right wrist harshly and didn’t answer. He stared at the scarred skin on his forearm, the spot where his bone had broken clean through the skin a few months after he’d last seen Peter. The scar was ugly, a raised patch of horribly discolored tissue that Harley wished he could claw off.
Peter’s eyes fell on it, and he frowned. No doubt that he was mentally categorizing it, recalling all of his time with Harley and trying to remember the scar. He wouldn’t.
“Harley, why didn’t you tell someone? Tony could have come, I could have come, hell, I’m sure Pepper would have marched down here herself and kicked that guy’s ass-”
“My mom is pregnant.”
There. He said it.
“Wha-- Oh. Shit. How did this happen?”
Harley tried for humor because he felt like he could cut the tension in the room with a knife.
“Peter, when two people love each other very much…” he trailed off, unable to finish the joke. A lot of words could be used to describe his parents’ relationship, but love wasn’t one of them. Maybe to them, in their own twisted way, it was, but to Harley, it was nothing but hatred and pain. Heartbreak. A family portrait with a face cut out and then pasted over again. A hole in his life where his dad should be.
Peter stared at him, saying, “Harley, this is serious.”
Harley sighed. Obviously, it was serious. The weight of this secret had been crushing him for months. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let some of it out, and have someone else hold it for a while, and Peter was strong. He could bear this, even when Harley couldn’t.
“He came back last summer, just drove up one night, and knocked on the door. No explanations, no regret, just him knocking and asking to be let in. My mom wouldn’t let up on him and tried to call the cops. But the property is in his name, and the kid is definitely going to be his, so there was nothing they could do. She had to let him stay. I tried to call Tony, but he wasn’t picking up. Nobody was. Had no idea why, but there was nothing I could do about it.”
Peter’s eyebrows scrunched.
“Summer,” he muttered, thinking. Harley let him.
“Ah, shit, that was the Budapest mission. He and Nat wouldn’t let anyone talk to them for weeks. Phones off, no comms, nothing. Fury said that none of us, not even Pepper had the clearance to know the details. He won’t talk about it.” Peter sounded mad.
Harley nodded, but couldn’t stop the twinge of resentment at Tony, who promised he’d always be there for him, ignoring him. Harley continued with his story.
“So that’s how it went, for a few days they both avoided one another. My dad slept in his truck and my mom refused to leave the house. Ariel and I snuck out in the middle of the night to feed the sheep, it was that bad. But then, one day, I came home from school, and there he was, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. He’d made her coffee, and she was laughing. I almost kicked his ass then, I couldn’t believe that he’d weaseled his way in, but I hadn’t seen my mom smile in weeks.
And Ariel, God, she loved him. She was too young to really remember him after things got bad, so it was like she got her dad back. I guess she did, because it’s like, fuck, he never stopped loving her. Just saw her and scooped her up like she was still five. They were both laughing.”
“What about you, Harley?”
What about him?
He’d walked into that kitchen, and stared the source of his worst nightmares right in the eyes. Instantly, memories came flooding back, ones he’d been repressing for years.
Picking broken glass out of his palms when he was eight, his only company being a broken beer bottle dripping foam onto the floor next to him.
Flinching back from the sound of a kitchen chair smashing on the floor next to his head on his tenth birthday while the fan caused the party streamers to flutter above his head.
A bruise shaped like the tip of a work boot pressed into his ribs flashed in the mirror as he changed for P.E. in seventh grade.
Stealing concealer from the drugstore on the way home from school to cover the bruises on his cheek. Applying it in the employee bathroom so he could go home and greet his mom like everything was fine.
Learning to drive at fourteen after his dad had called, high off his ass, from some field fifteen miles from home. Nearly smashing through the barn doors in his haste to reverse and get the fuck out of there.
Smashed glass and broken dreams. A father, but not a dad.
“Hey, son, your mom and I were just talking about you. Thinking of asking you about baby names” His dad’s hand curled around his mom’s, a big, easy smile on his lips. The same smile that Harley had. Harley had wanted him dead at that moment. Gone. Out of his life.
Forever.
“Don’t talk about her. Don’t touch her. Get out of my house!” He’d stormed into the kitchen, hands twitching as he passed the knife block. He didn’t want another baby to be born into this fucked-up family, two kids were plenty. He had barely survived, and he wasn’t about to let another kid go through the pain of having a deadbeat dad run off from a strung-out mom.
His father had laughed.
“Your house? It’s my name on the deed, kiddo.”
It was, unfortunately, even though Harley had been paying half of the mortgage for years. So his father stayed.
Things were tense for weeks, so it was almost a relief when the tension broke. His dad, with all of his promises of being clean from drugs, had come home one day in the early morning hours while Harley was shearing the sheep. They’d walked in one after another, Harley’s father stumbling as he went, not even pausing to take off his shoes. He stopped in the living room to throw something out of his pocket and continued on, heading towards the bedroom Harley’s parents now shared.
Harley had looked at it and felt a burning rage. At the tiny, empty plastic bag sitting on the coffee table, a smattering of dust around the opening. A spoon with burnt markings on the end. A syringe.
Harley picked up the bag with a “The fuck is this?”
He knew, of course. He knew his dad was high off his ass, and that he should have left it alone. But his mom was in that bedroom, and hell if he was going to let this fucker anywhere near her anymore.
And in the end, his efforts were for nothing. All he got was a litany of bruises and a smashed phone.
His father stayed angry, forbidding Harley from seeing Tony, from seeing his friends, from driving, from doing anything but go to school, and from doing the chores. He’d continued to leave in the middle of the night, and Harley had continued to watch him.
He’d tried. He hid the car keys, stole the money from his father’s wallet, and dumped the bags he found down the drain, but nothing worked. His father kept pretending and his mother went along with it. It felt like she didn’t even remember that Harley existed, wouldn’t listen to his concerns, wouldn’t look at his face.
Harley wondered, sometimes, if she knew what was going on, and was just too scared to admit it. If she admitted it, she would have to admit her struggles with addiction, too, though hers hadn't ever been nearly as intense.
But it’s always hard to admit when you’ve got a problem.
Things were easier for her with his dad around. He had a job, or at least a source of income. He’d leave for hours every day, coming back with cash or with groceries, and greet everyone with a smile. The light in his eyes always died when he looked at Harley.
His father’s hatred was easier to bear than the boredom. His life had been quiet this past year with the silence of pretending to be alright, to be normal.
But now Peter was here, filling his house with light and sound, clawing the secrets from Harley and allowing them to see the light of day after all this time.
Finally, Harley was finished. He looked at Peter, expecting him to say something, but he didn’t. He just looked stunned.
After a moment he blew out a loud breath and said, “Okay, I knew it was bad, but Jesus, Harley.”
Harley just buried his face in his hands. Then--
“Wait, you ‘knew it was bad’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Peter gave him a guilty look, glancing towards the door.
“Peter, Peter . Tell me what’s going on.”
Nothing. Peter just kept looking at him as if he were waiting for something. Harley’s stomach twisted again.
“Peter, you have to tell me what you’re doing here.”
As it turns out, Peter didn’t have to say anything. The sudden commotion outside drowned out whatever answer he might have had.
Harley heard a truck pull up, and then the familiar whine of a repulsor. There was a wrenching screech, as if something was being torn open, and then yelling. An explosion. He smelled the burning before he actually saw it.
Peter looked at him guiltily before pulling them both to their feet. He tapped his free hand to his ear and started talking. Harley realized with a start that he wasn’t talking to him.
How the hell hadn’t he noticed the comms?
“Parker here. I’ve got Harley, we’re leaving now.”
Harley wrenched himself out of Peter’s grip, alight with anger. When Peter turned for him, Harley grabbed two handfuls of his sweater and yanked.
“Were they listening?”
Peter looked surprised, but he wasn’t hurt. Harley, as mad as he was, would never hurt him.
“Don’t play dumb with me Parker. The Avengers, the team, fucking Tony. Did they hear that?”
Peter glared at him. Suddenly, with no warning, he was pushing Harley’s hands away. The two of them stood inches apart.
“Do you seriously think I would do that to you? Obviously, they weren’t listening to you! And you’d know that if you actually paid attention when I gave you lessons on operating the equipment, Harley.”
Harley made a frustrated noise.
“Well, excuse me for being a little on edge about a situation involving me spilling my biggest secrets to you while the Avengers blow up my garage.”
Another blast came from outside, and Harley watched one of the sheep run past through the kitchen window. That was his final straw, so he dragged Peter into the kitchen with him to pull on his shoes.
“About that, actually,” he continued as he sped through the back door, Peter in tow, “Couldn’t you have, like, asked them to not blow up my mom’s place? I take care of these sheep myself, you know.”
Peter gestures to where Clint is, watching as he blasts the doors off of Harley’s dad’s car.
“I told them to get rid of his stuff, not yours.”
And Harley looks.
Aside from one of the barn doors coming off its hinges, most of Harley’s places are untouched. Even the sheep have been herded back by an unmanned Iron Man suit, which is ordering them to ‘Remain Calm and Wait for Assistance’ which Harley could honestly laugh at.
“So, what? You guys all came here to cause property damage and scare the shit out of my family, is that so? Did you bring the Quin, too? Make a little mission out of saving my sorry-ass from my own parents? Seriously, Peter did you guys think this was going to make me feel good? I don’t need you guys to play the hero for me, I can handle this myself.”
Peter stopped them in the middle of the yard as the sounds of battle raged around them. Harley pointedly did not look at him, gaze focused on the sheep.
“Harley, we came here on Fury’s orders, not mine or Tony’s. We honestly had no idea that we were going to find you here until FRIDAY scanned the place and found your heat signature. I didn’t even know this was your house until I saw the sheep!”
Harley turned towards him again.
“Fury asked you to come here? Why?”
“That powder, the drugs? They’re not ordinary. There’s a compound in them that’s similar to what they found in the spider that bit me. Someone’s been supplying these drugs, trying to create an army of enhanced people where the law would never think to look, in Fury’s words. We think your father knows who it might be.”
Harley could not believe it.
But then again, it would make a lot of things make more sense.
The random reappearance after years, the unexplained wads of cash, the hours spent in the garage or on the phone, the sudden desire to make a family.
Harley needed to talk to his mom.
But first, he had a man to beat up.
Peter must have noticed Harley’s sudden change in demeanor, the shift in his anger from Peter to his father, because he put a hand on Harley’s chest and told him to wait.
“You didn’t think I’d let you join this fight without a suit, did you?”
That was exactly what Harley needed to hear. Peter pulled a small, metallic triangle from a pocket within his suit and threw it on the ground. Nearly instantaneously, the triangle began to glow and expand, forming a gauntlet that Harley scooped up. Within seconds, he was comfortably enveloped by the weight of his suit.
“Hello Harley, it’s nice to see you again,” came Karen’s warm voice.
Oh, he’d missed this. The HUD showed his heart rate spiking, which didn’t surprise him. Harley was having a lot of emotional turmoil at that moment.
“Fire her up, K.” And she did.
Harley was airborne for the first time in months, which would have been exhilarating if the scene beneath him was less horrifying.
His father was being held by Clint, who had a wicked knife to his throat and didn’t look afraid to use it. But the man didn’t look scared. In fact, he was grinning and throwing taunts at the circle of Avengers around him, as if he wasn’t staring down Earth’s deadliest heroes.
Harley blasted into the circle, throwing up a shower of dirt upon impact. He flipped up his face plate so that his father could see his rage.
“Dad,” he greeted, coldly. His father’s gaze met his, and there was something broken in his eyes. But, for the first time, he didn’t find the hatred that his father’s gaze usually held. Instead, there was surprise, as if the man couldn’t believe that Harley was there.
His old man laughed, a show of his mania. No sane person would be surrounded by the Avengers and have the audacity to laugh. No sane person would look at the expression on Peter’s, Tony’s, or Harley’s faces and find it within themselves to laugh.
But his dad did.
Harley turned towards Clint.
“Let him go.”
It wasn’t a request. The archer did so with extreme trepidation. He knew what it was like to need vengeance, and he also knew what it was like to have parents who looked at you like you were scum on Earth. He dropped him, sending the eldest Keener to the ground. He landed hard, and Harley was there, pulling him up by the shirt.
He was yelling.
“You knew, you asshole. You knew what you were doing to her, to us, to our family. I told you to stop, and you didn’t listen.” Harley threw his father down, disgusted an let him hit the ground. When the man didn’t react, Harley pulled him up again. Maybe it wasn’t fair to kick a man who was already down, but Harley’s father wasn’t a great follower of that particular rule, so Harley let it slide.
He didn’t say a word. No one did. They all just watched Harley and the sorry, drugged-out excuse he had for a father.
Harley realized something with a jolt.
All this time, there had never been a sign of his father’s drug abuse. His skin remained clear of needle marks, his gaze alert, his bill of health clean as a whistle. But his mom-
His mom, who had been tired and bruising more easily, getting dizzy and weak, who’d experienced complications from this pregnancy that she hadn’t had before.
“You were never taking them, you were giving them to her, weren’t you?” He nearly whispered it, the weight of that statement making it sit on Harley's tongue like stone.
His father didn’t have the decency to look at him, so Harley powered up his repulsor and held it close to the man’s face, the whine enough of a threat. Still, he continued.
“You
asshole
. You drugged the woman who’s carrying your fucking child,” Harley growled, “You’re going to get her killed. Was that your goal? You wanted this to happen, so you could see the results of your sick little experiment, is that right?”
When his father didn’t answer, Harley threw him and blasted the ground next to his head.
His father’s eyes, for once, held the same fear that Harley’s had for the past seventeen years.
He paused, seconds from punching the man’s teeth in, to look around. The Avengers looked downright pissed, like none of them would blame him for taking the hit.
But Harley was better than that.
“Nat,” he whispered, glaring at the form on the ground, “Take him. Interrogate him. I want you to find out everything. I don’t care what it takes. But when you’re done, I want him gone, forever.”
Harley wasn’t sure what that decision meant, or how it would affect his mother and sister and his unborn sibling, but he was sure of one thing. He couldn’t survive another second with his father, and living with his mother wouldn’t be much better. As it was, she needed serious help, and fast.
Help that Harley couldn’t provide. He was just seventeen, he could barely make his own breakfast without help.
His mother needed more than him.
“You can’t get rid of me that easily, son.” It was the first thing his dad had said.
Harley turned back to him, seething.
“Don’t call me that, You’ve never been my father.”
Anger didn’t even begin to cover what he was feeling. Harley felt as if his very blood was on fire, his whole body alight with a seething, pulsing rage.
“Son,” the man on the ground tried, beseeching, “Don’t do this to me, to us.”
Harley didn’t even have to touch him. His anger became a thing of its own, and a great burst of purple light spread from Harley’s chest and slammed into his father. Harley was screaming, years of rage and pain and sorrow escaping him at once. Harley raised his arms without thinking, and more tendrils of light sprouted forth, creeping toward the man in front of him.
Harley heard shouting, but he didn’t care. He was certain that he couldn’t stop…whatever this was even if he tried.
“You did this to
me.
I hate you for pretending to be my father, and for pretending to care about us. I already have a dad, and his name is Tony!”
The man on the ground screamed. It was terrifying to hear, to know that your tormenter was capable of feeling pain. But Harley couldn’t stop, and he didn’t feel particularly bad about it. He wasn’t even sure if he was able to control this.
Finally, the flow of energy subsided, and Harley listed, ready to slump down and meet the ground. A strong pair of arms caught him, and Harley relaxed for the first time in nearly a year.
“Relax, I’ve got you, kid.”
The Mechanic was here, and Harley was filled with utter relief. Tony would be able to fix this, he could fix anything.