Chapter Text
May is pretty proud of herself for bringing the photo albums. She hadn’t given it a lot of thought, in the moment. She’d gone to her room to change before Captain America and the Winter Soldier took her to meet Iron Man, who is apparently Peter’s father – crazy! – and spotted the photo she keeps on the dresser of Peter, Ben, and Rick that was taken at the Stark Expo in 2010. They’re in front of the unisphere, posed and smiling brightly. Peter is around five or six years old and dressed like one of the merchandise booths exploded onto him. Rick’s holding Peter propped on one hip while Ben leans over to give his brother bunny ears.
Looking at it, the thought had hit her that Tony Stark missed twelve years of his child’s life, and she can’t give those back to him. All she can give him are the photos and videos. Answer any questions he asks.
Give him back the child she raised.
Tony seems fascinated by them. Peter is chagrined. Either way, they’ve been a good ice breaker after yesterday, which had vasicilitated wildly between being overwhelming and awkward.
“Oh god, May.” Peter groans. “I thought we agreed to burn this one.”
She peers over his shoulder. The photo in question is from a play in elementary school about the founding fathers. Peter had just gotten glasses and they hadn’t had time to switch out the first, cheap set of frames, so the round shape makes his eyes look huge. His wig is sitting askew and his costume is too big. He’s slumped on the steps outside the school, next to another boy, both of them glowering at the camera.
“Who are you supposed to be?” Tony asks.
“I honestly don’t remember,” Peter says.
Pepper comes back in the room, Morgan resting on one hip. She leans over Tony’s shoulder. “Oh, that’s adorable,” she says.
“He’s Benjamin Franklin,” May says. “You forgot all your lines,” she adds. “You got up there and just stared at the crowd like a little deer in the headlights. The teacher had to step in and save you.” She grins at Tony. “I’m sure I have video.”
“No,” Peter says.
“I absolutely need to see that,” Tony tells her.
Pepper laughs. “Tony never sticks to his lines either. Every press conference is an adventure.”
“You like when I go off script,” Tony says. “I proposed to her at a press conference,” he explains to Peter.
“Occasionally it works out,” Pepper acknowledges.
May watches them, bemused. It hits her again that she’s talking to Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. This weekend has been completely surreal, and if not for the results of the DNA test she’s seen with her own eyes, and the resemblance she can see now that Tony and Peter are sitting next to each other, she’s not sure she’d believe any of it is real.
May’s digging through the box to see if that play is on one of the disks she brought. Ben used to have a fancy camera he recorded everything on before burning it to DVD so there are a handful of SD cards too, and she’d just grabbed the box he kept everything in when they’d headed up here. There’s a single VHS tape that May hadn’t noticed before, and she pulls it out, curious. The sticker is peeling and the writing is in cyrillic.
“I think this might be from the orphanage,” she says. “I can’t read it.”
Tony takes the tape from her, turning it over in his hands with a frown. “VHS, Jesus. Okay, be right back.” He sets the tape down on the coffee table. “Wanna see the garage?” he asks Peter, a little too casual. Like he hasn’t spent the past day and a half barely looking away from him.
“Uh, sure,” Peter says, trailing after Tony out of the room.
Pepper settles onto the couch, adjusting the baby on her lap. “They’ll be awhile if he’s gonna build a VCR from scratch.”
May leans in for a closer look at Morgan, who’s been napping the past hour. “Hello, darling,” she coos. Morgan smiles at her. She has the same eyes as Peter.
May wonders, suddenly, how this is going to work. Is she supposed to leave Peter here? Walk away? Or are they going to hash out a schedule like divorced parents? She’s raised him for eight years, she would die for him, and yet her claim on him is suddenly very tenuous.
It only takes Tony and Peter an hour to come back with a VCR. It also plays DVDs and reads all the various memory card sizes. May watches as they hook it up to the television. “Where did you even get the parts?” she asks.
“Probably dismantled our toaster,” Pepper says.
“It’s a video player, it's not like it was hard,” Tony says. “Kid did most of it. Your toaster’s fine.” He sticks the tape in, then stops. “Oh, we forgot a remote.”
May laughs.
“In my defense, we don’t have remotes for anything. FRIDAY controls it all.”
“You mean you didn’t put an A.I. in the custom VCR?” Pepper asks, feigning shock.
“Gimme another fifteen minutes and I will.”
“Just use the buttons.”
“Buttons,” Tony says, as if offended by the very concept.
Pepper grabs Tony’s hand, pulling him down to sit on the couch. She hands Morgan to him. Tony bounces her, and Morgan slaps a hand against his chin, babbling.
“We did remember buttons,” Peter says, hitting play and settling onto the floor in front of the couch.
The video starts off with static, then flickers into an image of a very young Peter sitting on a chair. He’s wearing a red t-shirt with some sort of cartoon on it and jeans with white sneakers. He’s not looking at the camera, staring at something off to the left.
Tony makes a sound, like a gasp, and May turns to see Pepper take Morgan from his arms.
Teenage Peter, cross-legged on the floor, leans forward. “I’ve never seen this,” he says.
“I think Rick and Mary must have had it,” May murmurs, eyes still on Tony. He’s leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands covering his mouth.
A woman off camera says something in what must be Russian or Ukrainian. Peter doesn’t react. She speaks again, and then a hand leans in, waving in his face. Peter jerks back before finally looking up, frowning. Confused.
The woman speaks again and Peter stays silent, eventually looking away from her again and back to the left. The woman sounds annoyed, and after a minute another voice replaces hers, this one speaking in heavily accented English.
“Say your name.”
Peter looks up at her, but still doesn’t speak.
“Name,” the prompt comes again. More silence. “You understand, yes? Say your name.”
“Nico,” Peter says. He looks to the left again, and May can barely make out the mumbled, “Nick,” that follows.
“Age?” the woman asks.
Peter looks up at the camera. “Can I go?” he points to the left.
“Nyet. Age?”
Annoyance flashes over Peter’s face and he remains silent.
“Family will like if you talk,” the woman tells him.
Peter sits up a bit, paying more attention to her after that. “Can I go home now?” he asks, plaintively.
“Soon,” the woman says.
Peter frowns, kicking his feet against the legs of the chair. “It is soon.”
“You are a good boy, yeah?”
Peter nods, looking confused again. “If I’m good can I go home?”
“Yes,” the woman says. “Age?” she prompts again.
“Three,” Peter says, holding up his fingers.
There’s a noise, children laughing, and Peter looks away again. “Go play,” the woman tells him.
Peter’s scrambles off the chair and out of the frame without any more prompting.
The video cuts to static for a moment, then May’s started by the sight of Rick and Mary smiling at the camera. “Hey!” Rick says. “We’re here to meet Nikola for the first time today.”
Mary waves at the camera, her smile wide.
The video is jerky, but follows them down a hallway to a smaller room. It looks like a playroom, but Peter’s the only child there right now, sitting at a table with a coloring book and crayons.
Mary heads straight for him. “Hi, sweetheart,” she says, voice soft. She snags one of the chairs across the table from Peter.
Peter looks up at her for a moment, then eyes Rick who’s come to stand behind her. He doesn’t say anything before going back to the coloring book.
“My name’s Mary. I’m going to be your Mommy. And this is Rick, your Daddy.”
Peter looks between them again, but still doesn’t say anything.
The woman manning the camera translates to Russian, but Peter ignores her. “He’s quiet,” the woman says.
“That’s okay,” Rick says. He sits down at the table too, and says something in stilted Russian to Peter.
Peter looks up at him warily.
“He understands English,” the woman says.
“Do you?” Rick asks Peter.
Peter looks back at the coloring book.
“That’s okay, buddy.” Rick says. He says something in Russian too.
The video goes on with Rick and Mary talking softly to Peter while he ignores them, for the most part. Until Rick pulls out a toy car he’s brought with him, and hands it to Peter with a tentative smile.
“They said you like cars?” he says, tacking on another word in Russian to the end.
Peter reaches for the toy, turning it over in his hands. “Camaro,” he says, poking at the windows of the car.
Mary smiles. “That’s right. How did you know that?”
Peter shrugs.
That’s the only thing he says for the entire meeting with Mary and Rick. When they leave, they both give him a hug, and Peter doesn’t move away, but he doesn’t hug them back. The video cuts back to static.
The living room is silent. Present day Peter leans forward, turning off the video player, and looks back at them nervously. “I don’t remember any of that,” he says.
Tony has his entire face buried in his hands now, Pepper resting a hand on his back. Her eyes are red.
“You were really little,” May tells Peter. She’s regretting getting this video out now. It feels like it was too soon.
Tony finally looks up, staring at the now dark television screen. “That’s what– That shirt,” he says. “In the first part. You were wearing it. That morning.” He lets out a shuddering breath. “Fuck.”
Peter seems lost, watching him. “I do remember the orphanage, a little, just not that video. Or meeting my mo–,” he stops himself, biting his lip. “I mean, it was fine. It wasn’t, like, bad or anything.” He seems to be trying to reassure them all. “They were really nice there.”
“You just looked scared. That’s all, honey,” Pepper says softly.
May feels like she needs to explain, as much as she can. “He didn’t talk, for a while. Several months. We thought– I mean, we thought it was the language. That he didn’t understand English.” Tony scrubs his hands over his face and looks over at her finally. “And none of us spoke Russian,” May goes on. “We learned a bit but he didn’t respond to that either. Then one day he just started talking, full sentences, like he’d never stopped. We thought he’d learned it by immersion.” She smiles, a bit watery. “And of course, he’s never shut up since.”
“Hey,” Peter says.
It gets the smile she was hoping for from Tony, small though it is.