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Jean has been thinking it over, and she’s decided that Peter needs some friends.
It’s not that he doesn’t have friends, exactly; he’s still rebuilding, after the spell thing that made everyone forget him (and Stephen Strange is on Jean’s permanent shit-list for that nonsense, what the hell kind of Sorcerer Supreme is he, that the only solution to a problem he helped create was to literally erase an eighteen-year-old from existence? If she sees him, it’s on goddamn sight), but he does have people now. Frank is a near-constant presence, Ned has them over for movie nights, even the detective he works with calls him socially now. He has friends. It’s just, to Jean, it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Peter deserves more than that.
She thinks Peter deserves a family. People who care about him, who understand him, who can look out for him when she’s not there. She’s one person, and he’s a disaster; she needs reinforcements, okay? Ned and Frank are great, and she’s prepared to tolerate MJ for Peter’s sake, but Peter makes a concerted effort at involving himself in every apocalyptic event within a hundred-mile radius of New York, and emotional support from Ned and artillery support from Frank isn’t going to cut it when Spiderman inevitably decides to fight Cthulhu.
She had briefly considered the merits of introducing him to Professor X and the rest of his team as more than her pseudo-brother, and had disregarded the idea just as quickly. From what Scott has told her, the X-Men generally create just as many problems as they solve, and the last thing she needs is Peter throwing down with Magneto. Anyway, Peter gets squirmy when she mentions them; he won’t tell her why, just mumbles something about Tony Stark and gossip whenever she asks, then clams up. She’ll get it out of him eventually, but for now, the X-Men are a no-go.
Unfortunately, her list of options more or less ends there. Funnily enough, spending the last year on the run from the government looking for her sister and mind-controlling her way through New York didn’t exactly lend itself well to friendships; most of the people she’d met since then had already been Peter’s friends. She needs some heavy-hitters, anyway. People prepared to throw down with a God for Peter if need be.
She doesn’t know why she didn’t consider the New Avengers. Possibly because when Peter describes them, it’s pretty clear that they’re a goddamn mess; he’s only worked with them a few times, he tells her, and apparently every single mission ends with some kind of catastrophe. They told Peter to stick to the “small potato” hero stuff, which Jean thinks is pretty rich; Spiderman has saved New York, and, you know, the planet they all live on, from certain doom more than they have, that’s for sure. All they seem to do is punch and shoot, so Jean’s not sure what all the fuss is about. At least the original Avengers had Thor.
Still, she’s curious. They might be good allies to have on team Protect-Peter-Parker, so when Peter gets a call from Yelena when she’s at his apartment, she asks if she can come along to meet her.
“You want to meet Black Widow,” Peter says, more a statement than a question, suspicious in a way that she might be offended by if she didn’t completely understand. She hadn’t exactly shown any interest thus far in inserting herself into his superhero business; she’d been a little busy getting involved in every aspect of his personal life.
“Sure,” she shrugs, “why not?”
She watches him think about that, because really, there are plenty of reasons why not. Jean was a criminal a year ago, actively working against a government agency, and even though she’s not exactly breaking any laws now (she doesn’t think; she’s not entirely sure about the legalities of Xavier’s school, considering the Professor fluctuates back and forth between advocating for passivism and having candlelit dinners with Magneto, depending on what day it is, which she’s decided is not her problem), it’s not like she’s sorry for the vast majority of her actions when she was looking for Sarah. She feels bad about the possession thing, and worse about the trying-to-hurt-Peter thing, but everything she did to the DODC? Yeah, she’s not exactly losing sleep over it.
And they might be useless, but the Avenger’s are still government adjacent, as far as she knows. So, she’s not sure how they’re going to react to her showing up at their headquarters with Spiderman like she’s a normal person, and not a threat to the social fabric. It looks like Peter isn’t sure either; he’s iffy about putting her in proximity to authority figures these days, after what happened last time.
However uncertain he is, Jean can see he’s about to give in. Peter wants her to have people, just as much as she wants that for him; she knows he worries about her socialisation, especially with his clear distain for the Professor’s methods in that regard. He thinks she needs to be around “normal” people, who have social skills and manners, who don’t play chess together and then beat the shit out of each other wearing costumes. She doesn’t think Black Widow counts as a normal person in any regard, but Peter respects her, likes her as a person.
Peter also never really says no to Jean, if she asks for something outright. He’s prepared to bend over backwards for her most of the time, even if they don’t really talk about it; he really is a better brother than he probably gives himself credit for, she thinks, almost smug about it. So even before he answers her, she knows she’s going to be meeting Yelena today, just because she expressed interest in doing so. Peter doesn’t need to know her motives just yet, she decides; she’ll evaluate whether or not the New Avengers are good enough for him, before she tells him.
**
Sure enough, a couple of hours later, she’s standing in the Watchtower, in the New Avengers common room. Yelena had tried to insist on meeting in her “office”, which Peter told her disdainfully was in a spa, of all things. He’d told Yelena, scandalised, that he wasn’t bringing a teenager to a place where nudity was all but required, and she’d complained about his delicate sensibilities, but acquiesced fairly quickly.
Jean wasn’t sure why, but she’d kind of expected the place to look like a frat house; messy, chaotic, haphazard. Peter’s stories didn’t exactly give the impression of people who were organised in any aspect of their lives; she was surprised to find that the common area was neat and tidy. She wondered if they had a cleaning crew or something; it didn’t seem like someone as paranoid as Yelena would let random people in to organise their magazines or clean the kitchen.
The woman herself arrives a moment after they do. Peter tenses a little; he’s wearing his full costume, mask included, because apparently not everyone is as good as Jean is at finding out people’s secret identities, and the Avengers somehow don’t know that he’s Peter Parker. This isn’t improving her opinion of their capabilities, honestly; aren’t some of these people meant to be spies? Jean’s still in high school, and she has better counter-surveillance skills than these people.
“Spiderman,” Yelena greets pleasantly, then looks at Jean, “and this must be the small potato.”
“Pardon?” Jean says flatly, and Peter kicks her ankle in a way that means he needs her to stop using the serial killer voice, thanks.
“Not so much a small potato in the end, huh,” Yelena says, and shrugs at Peter in apology. “Sorry about that. In hindsight, it was probably a “us” problem.”
“In hindsight, she wasn’t a problem at all,” Peter says, mild in a way that belies the fact that he’s standing like he’s prepared to launch himself at Yelena if she calls Jean a problem again. Yelena smiles wider, and Jean wonders if she can’t see it, or if she’s ignoring it, the way that if Peter decided to fight her, she’d lose. She doesn’t understand how people constantly underestimate Peter; is it the spell thing? Or is it that he’s such a good guy, people don’t realise that him not taking people’s heads off is a conscious choice? He held his own against the Hulk; are these people stupid?
“I was kind of a problem,” Jean tells Peter, because she appreciates the defence, really, she does, but she was successfully terrorising New York for a while there. She’s not proud of it, exactly, but she wants her props for it, nonetheless.
“You were,” Yelena tells her, but she’s grinning at Jean in a conspiratory way. Then, her smile gets a little sad. “I would have done worse, I think. When my sister died, I went a little crazy, trying to avenge her. If I thought she was alive, I would have done the same thing.”
Oh. Okay. The grief floods back in, vivid and agonising, and in that moment Jean doesn’t know if it’s hers, Yelena’s, or some combination of the two. There’s something about knowing that the worst thing that ever happened to you also happened to someone else that’s both gutting and weirdly comforting. There’s camaraderie in shared misery; there is at least one other person who understands, and in this case, they’re in the same room. For a second, Jean sees in Yelena’s eyes the same look she sees in her own most mornings, before she’s awake enough to bury the feeling.
“Thanks,” Jean says, because if she says anything else, she’s going to end up spilling her feelings all over the surprisingly clean floor of the Avengers common room, and then she’d be forced to throw herself out of the window out of sheer embarrassment.
Yelena grimaces at her in a vaguely apologetic way, and Peter is looking at her like he’s considering hugging her in the Avengers living room, which is going to be humiliating for both of them. If anyone touches her, or tries to be gentle with her, or, God forbid, asks if she’s okay, she’s going to burst in to tears. Jean needs them to leave the room immediately.
Yelena, apparently reading her expression with so much accuracy that Jean briefly wonders if she’s maybe not the only telepath in the vicinity, turns to Peter and tells him they can go over the files in the other room. Peter doesn’t look thrilled at the possibility, but Jean makes a shooing motion.
“Will you be okay here for a while?” Peter asks her, still concerned.
She rolls her eyes at him. “I think I’ll survive being alone for an hour.”
Peter looks dubious, but allows Yelena to lead him away. Jean’s left in the kitchen, and finally has a second to breathe. Once she’s no longer in any danger of hyperventilating, she gets curious. She’s never been in like, a lair before, unless you could the Professor’s library, which she doesn’t but the other students at school clearly do. This is so much cooler than that.
She wonders if Peter has been here before. He hadn’t said anything, but Jean knew this used to be Stark Tower, before it was the Avengers Tower; it’s possible Peter’s spent time in this building, long before his life went to shit. That makes her curious enough to start snooping; are there any traces of Stark still here? She knows so little of him, outside of what used to be on the news before he died, and the titbits Peter will drop like breadcrumbs occasionally.
She’s brazen enough to start going through the New Avenger’s stuff; if anyone says anything, she’ll explain that until recently, she was a fugitive intent on revenge, and therefore can’t be expected to have things like “social skills” or “manners”. Peter will absolutely back her up, considering it’s a little bit true. She’s rummaging through a drawer when she hears someone approach.
“Um. Hello?”
She turns to face the direction the voice came from, an excuse half-formed on her lips, and immediately feels like she’s been hit by a truck. Whoa. Jean has been making a real effort to avoid reading people’s minds when she can; Professor X keeps droning on about autonomy and respect, and Peter keeps stressing that going in to people’s minds is a “real dick move, Jean, it’s super rude,” so she’s been trying harder to keep her mental walls up. Occasionally though, she meets someone who is impossible to block out. Some people’s thoughts are just louder than others, she figures, in the way that some people are just loud in general; it doesn’t happen often, so it usually isn’t a problem.
The thoughts of whoever has just walked into the room, however, are screaming at her, loud like she’s in the same room as a commercial airliner. She actually puts her hands over her ears instinctively, a futile attempt to block out the sheer noise that’s assaulting her mind. It’s not even formed thoughts, nothing concrete she could make out; just constantly changing sounds and images, being shot at her like speeding bullets.
“Jesus Christ,” she grits out, desperately trying to block out the worst of the barrage. It’s like trying to stop a tsunami with a sieve, but after a moment, she manages to force the deluge back. When she does, she becomes aware of a frantic voice.
“Oh, fuck, are you okay?”
She squeezes her eyes closed, and then opens them, taking her hands down from where they’d been uselessly shielding her ears. There’s a man standing in front of her, looking down at her with open concern. He’s taller than her but seems to be making the effort to appear smaller; she’s getting the impression that’s less a way to avoid intimidating her, and more his general state of being. He doesn’t look like someone who’s internal monologue consists of mostly panicked, frenzied screaming, but she guesses she shouldn’t judge people based on appearances, given what her own mental state has been like over the past year.
“I’m fine,” she tells him, straightening up and regarding him warily. “You’re just like, really loud, man.”
He looks confused. “I just said hello?”
She waves him off. “Not like, volume. Your thoughts.”
“My thoughts?”
She had assumed that the New Avengers would have been aware of who she was before they even let her in the door; Yelena knew, obviously, so surely the rest of her team had been told. Then again, Peter was… protective of her, and defensive about people’s perception of her, after everything she did when she was looking for Sarah. Jean had been prepared for people to look at her with censure; she’d frozen half of Manhattan, and possessed a lot of people before that. Fear was probably the least of the reactions she could expect if people found out who she was, and what she’d done.
Peter, however, did not agree. He took great offence whenever anyone, Jean included, implied that she’d ever done anything wrong in her entire life. She’d tried to explain to him that people were entitled to their anger at her; he had, in typical Peter fashion, stubbornly insisted that anyone who wanted to be angry at her would have to go through him first. And he thought he wouldn’t be a good brother, Jean thought fondly. Maybe it wasn’t too far outside the realm of possibility that Peter would have sworn Yelena to secrecy about who she was.
“I’m Jean,” she told the man, because Peter hadn’t sworn her to secrecy. “I’m a telepath, and your thoughts are super loud.”
“Oh,” he says, a little non-plussed. “I’m Bob. Sorry, I guess? About the thoughts thing- I didn’t know I was doing that.”
She shrugs. “Some people are louder than others. It’s not your fault.”
They both scrutinise each other for a second. Jean is a little confused as to who he is, honestly; he doesn’t look like any of the Avengers that she knows of, old or new. Bob just looks like a regular guy; a slightly jumpy guy, who’s head sounds like the inside of the seventh circle of hell, but a normal person other than that. She supposes that she doesn’t look like a telepathic nightmare on a vengeance quest either, so maybe she doesn’t have any room to judge.
“Are you a superhero too?” He asks her, tilting his head like he’s evaluating her.
She snorts; she can’t help it. “No,” she tells him, smiling, “I don’t exactly think I’m qualified. I’m just here with Spiderman.”
Bob lights up. “Oh, cool, Spiderman’s the best,” he grins, and Jean immediately places him on her mental list of Potential-Friends-For-Peter, and also to her list of People-I-Don’t-Want-Dead. Neither of them are particularly long lists as it stands, so she’s thrilled with this development. “Why aren’t you qualified?”
She considers that, because there’s a lot of reasons. If you asked Peter, he’d say she’s too young, and if you asked the Professor, he’d probably say something cryptic and imply she needs more time to hone her abilities (like honing her abilities was going to somehow make her more heroic; demonstrably false in her case. The last time she got better at using her powers, she took out half of Manhattan- it seems counterintuitive if you ask her). She doesn’t necessarily disagree with either of them, but there’s a much simpler explanation to offer Bob.
“I mind-controlled a bunch of people, froze half of the city, and tried to destroy the DODC. I don’t think I’m really the hero type.” Jean explains, voice as level as she can make it.
She waits for him to recoil, waits for the fear, the disgust. It doesn’t come. Bob just looks considering, empathetic.
“Yeah, me too,” he says vaguely, and that throws Jean.
“You too?” She asks, because that’s an odd thing to say when someone confesses to you that they’ve done a terrorism.
He looks down, and Jean is horrified to know that there’s yet another person who has puppy eyes that effective; it’s bad enough Peter employed them with devastating regularity, like whenever he wants her to stop skipping school, or to start behaving like a normal human being. Now she has this random guy using them on her in the goddamn Avengers kitchen.
“The void thing, a couple years ago? That was me. So, I’m not allowed on any teams now. In case I, you know, snap and turn a bunch of people in to shadows again. I mostly just live here and clean up; I’m like support staff now.”
Jean stares at him. She’d watched the news footage of the Void with Sarah, and if you’d given her a million guesses, she would have never picked the guy in front of her as the terrifying shadow monster that caused all that chaos. His hoodie has thumbholes, for gods’ sake; he looks like he belongs in a boy band.
Then again, she considers, it’s not like anyone would look at her and immediately assume she’s a telepath who went on a revenge tour of the city. Who’s she to judge? He seems like a nice enough guy, and it’s not like he’s turning anyone in to shadow now.
“Support staff sounds cool,” she says, and a little of the tension drains out of Bob. “Apparently I have to graduate before I can help Spiderman with any superhero stuff, which is lame.”
“How do you know him?” Bob asks, curious.
“He’s my brother,” Jean says proudly. “Well, near enough. He saved me, after the whole mind control thing.”
She watches his eyes go soft. “He’s your Yelena.”
Jean’s eyebrows go up. “Oh?”
“She saved me,” he says, gentle, like he couldn’t quite believe it. “She was the first person I ever met who treated me like I was worth anything. Without her? Who knows where I’d be. Dead, probably. Or still turning people in to shadow things. It wouldn’t be anything good, that’s for sure.”
Jean had absolutely made the right choice coming here, she decides. Even if the rest of them were totally useless assholes, Bob and Yelena were clearly good people. More importantly, they’d be able to understand how Peter and Jean were with each other; they were the same. Or, as close as she was going to get.
“Lucky us, huh?” She grins at him, and he looks like he could be a superhero for real when he smiles like that.
“Lucky us,” he agrees. “You want to help me with dinner while you wait?”
She shrugs. “Sure.” One of them needs to be able to cook, and it isn’t going to be Peter; considering the amount of takeout they eat, she’s going to have to start worrying about their sodium consumption at some point. Frank can only cook chilli with any degree of success, so if any of them are going to eat a vegetable that hasn’t been fried, it’s on her. Anyway, it’s not like home ec is an option at Xaviers.
By the time Peter and Yelena come back, Bob is halfway through teaching her how to cook actual food. Peter stops dead as soon as he walks through the door.
“Ooooh, pot roast!” Yelena says happily, strolling into the room like there’s nothing strange about the scene. Jean likes her more by the second, honestly.
“Uh,” Peter says, coming over to Jean cautiously, “what’s this?”
“I know you think cereal is a meal, but I would have thought you’d recognise what actual cooking is,” Jean tells him, and she can tell he’s rolling his eyes at her under the mask.
“You think cereal is a meal?” Yelena asks, scandalised. “Spiderman, this is unacceptable. You need real food.”
“I eat real food,” Peter says, indignant, like Jean hasn’t seen the contents of his fridge and therefore knows the only consumables he has are energy drinks and frozen chicken nuggets.
“You guys should stay for dinner,” Bob says, hopeful, and Jean watches Peter’s instinct, after four years alone, to keep people at arm’s length war with his innate need to give Jean a social circle. She shoots him a pleading look, because her sad eyes aren’t as effective as Peter’s, or Bob’s, but they work pretty damn well when she needs them to.
He, predictably, folds like a lawn chair. Yelena fusses with him as he sits down at the counter, like a particularly cantankerous nana, and Jean goes back to helping Bob, smiling, satisfied with a plan come to fruition. Already, she has new allies in the Taking-Care-Of-Peter; they’re even feeding him! She knew coming here was a good idea.
**
Jean tries to tag along to more of Peter’s meetings with the New Avengers after that. It’s rare she likes anyone without having to make an effort, but she likes Yelena and Bob more than she ever would have expected. Peter still won’t take off his mask around them, but she can tell he wants to, which means he likes them too, even if he doesn’t trust them quite yet. Her ongoing campaign to get him some support in his ridiculously dangerous endeavours has been a tremendous success so far; Yelena has started checking in with Peter, giving him intel, and Bob has started sending him the meeting minutes from the official Avengers briefings. Jean suspects he might be breaking some kind of NDA by doing so, but she isn’t going to complain about something that might keep Peter safer. It just makes her like both of them more, honestly.
She does not, however, like all of the New Avengers. Ava is cool, if a little abrupt (it’s not like Jean has any room to talk in that regard), and Walker seems like a dick, but he’s at least a funny dick, and he doesn’t question her superfluous presence in the Watchtower, which is enough for Jean to tolerate him at least. Alexei is a lunatic, but he’s sweet to her and Peter, so she slides him into the category of Murderous Uncle Figure along with Frank in her head. It’s the last member of their little team Jean takes issue with. Because Bucky Barnes doesn’t like Peter, and that’s not something she’s prepared to let slide.
“Geez, this guy again,” Barnes mutters as they all stand around a console in the Watchtower control room, and Jean glares at him. She doesn’t know what the fuck this guy’s problem is, but if he thinks she’s going to let him treat Peter like an inconvenience, he’s sorely fucking mistaken. Peter gets tremendously uncomfortable whenever he has to interact with the Winter Soldier, and with Captain America on the rare occasion he shows his face around here. She doesn’t have the full context, but Peter had mumbled about a fight at an airport and catching someone’s metal arm the first time Barnes had been rude to him in Jean’s presence; she takes that to mean Peter kicked his ass, and the old man’s still bitter as all hell about it. She glares even harder.
“Bucky,” Yelena hisses, “stop being an asshole.”
“Yeah, Bucky,” Walker drawls, and yeah, Jean doesn’t really like him either, if only because he has never once, in the months she’s known him and presumably his whole life before that, been capable of thinking before he speaks, and therefore causes offence every time he opens his mouth. But at least he respects Peter enough not to outright insult him every time they’re in the same room, unlike some washed up assassins she could mention. And anyway, Bob insists Walker’s actually a big softie once you get to know him, and Jean is rapidly realising Bob is the only person in this whole motley crew that’s worth listening to about personal relations.
“Walker,” Ava warns, but John just scoffs.
“What?” Walker asks, like he’s not goading Barnes on purpose. “I’m agreeing with Yelena. He turns into a raging dick every time the Spider’s in the room.”
Peter is ignoring all of them in favour of examining the schematics they’d brought him here to look at, back to the group, but Jean can see the tension in his shoulders. His mask is on, so she can’t see him face, but she’s sure if she could, he’d have the look in his eyes she doesn’t like; the hopeless one, the one that makes him look lost, and younger than he is. She shifts, stands so she’s covering more of his open back; she’d promised she’d watch out for him, and she intends to keep that promise. Even if it means beating the shit out of the Winter Soldier, who has just registered her defensive stance and visibly startled.
He looks taken aback, like he hadn’t considered being a dick to Spiderman would result in his telepathic teenage sister trying to kill him with her mind. Yelena is looking back and forth between the two of them with interest, like she wants to see how that fight would go, and Jean wouldn’t mind finding out either. She glowers at him until he looks away, then realises she’s not the only person in the room who looks mightily unhappy with the Winter Soldier right now.
Bob, who Jean has never seen look anything other than perfectly amicable and sweet, is looking at Barnes with a strange head tilt, a glint in his eye that she hasn’t seen before. It makes him look more like the kind of person she could imagine being the Void, and the second Barnes and the others realise this, the tension levels in the room rocket.
Peter doesn’t react. Jean absorbs that for a second, realises what it means, and then all but lights up with happiness over it. Because Peter didn’t react. Peter has an innate instinct for danger that lets him swing from rooftops, fight supervillains, and, upsettingly, throw himself in front of bullets that he senses being fired at telepathic criminals, even when said telepathic criminal has him locked inside his own head. If something hostile is in the room, Peter knows about it. But he doesn’t so much as twitch, doesn’t look away from the paper in front of him, when Bob’s eyes are dark in a Considering-Turning-People-In-To-Shadows way. Peter is in the room with someone who has immeasurable power, and his instincts have told him that it’s not a problem; he’s on our side.
Jean is so good at this friends thing. She knew Peter needed friends who were willing and able to fight for him, ones that she could trust to have his back the next time aliens invaded and he decides that it’s his problem. And she went out and found him a guy whose rampage could only be stopped by the power of friendship, because nothing else was working; she’d done real good work here.
Yelena looks amused while she quietly talks Bob down, and Jean beams; another useful addition to the team. She shoulder checks Barnes on her way past (ineffectually, but really, it’s the thought that counts) and when she reaches Bob, the glint has gone, and his smile when she nudges him is real. Yelena shoots her a knowing look, like she’s fully aware that Jean is over the moon about the one-man nuke she’s just secured as a pal for her all-time favourite person, but Jean is too smug to care.
Throughout this, Peter stands, oblivious to the fact that his social circle has just doubled, and that Jean has all but ensured he’s going to survive to his thirties. Really, she’s doing a public service; she wonders if they make medals for this kind of thing. She makes a mental note to add a World’s Best Sister mug to her Christmas list; it gets truer by the day.
**
Peter has been missing for six hours when she stumbles into the Watchtower common room. Six hours since he went dark, since the open line he’s had with Frank and Jean went quiet after a single SOS. Six hours of searching, of casting her mental net as wide as it will go in the hopes of hearing something, anything, that might give her a hint as to where Peter has gone. She has exhausted all her other options; Frank has called everyone, even Daredevil, who he’s never had a conversation with without screaming. At hour two, Jean had ordered the Professor to call Magneto, and it’s a testament to how unhinged she’s acting that he does it without question. Even the Brotherhood don’t have any leads, although Magneto had assured her, knowing and sad in a way that makes her like him a little, despite the terrorism, that he would keep looking.
So, she goes to the Avengers. Because the whole point of this entire exercise was to give Peter people, ones who love him; people who would tear down the city to find him if need be. She’d been so confident, watching Bob glower at Barnes; now, with Peter gone, she’s less sure. She’s about to find out if she’d been right to trust them all; if she’s wrong, she’s going to make the DODC incident look like a fucking Easter egg hunt.
Bob sees her first, clocks the manic look in her eyes and the fact that she’s been crying, and stands immediately.
“Jean?” He asks, at her side in a moment, hands fluttering like he wants to comfort her but doesn’t know if it would be welcome. “What’s the matter? What happened?”
“Spiderman’s missing,” she forces the words out, hoarse and painful. “I can’t find him; I can’t hear him. Please. Please help.”
Yelena is up and moving before Jean has even finished speaking. She’s at the monitors, scanning whatever information she’d opened that she thinks might be useful, and Barnes, who Jean swears she will never glare at again after this, is on his feet, talking urgently into his phone. Walker and Ava are talking about suiting up, and Bob stays with Jean, hands on her shoulder, urging her to sit. She goes where he takes her, and closes her eyes. She had been right to trust them, to trust that they care about Peter; about both of them.
The relief of it is so strong it nearly knocks her over. She doesn’t have to find Peter alone; they’re going to find him together. Jean puts her head in her hands, and lets the tears fall.
**
It takes them a day to find Peter. Some two-bit crime lord got a hold of some proprietary black market Stark tech and got the drop on him. He’s unconscious when they find him, which turns out to be a good thing; if he’d been awake, he wouldn’t have approved of the level of murder that happened to the people who took him. Jean is viciously glad about it, which she might need to examine with her guidance councillor at some point. But when they’d found Peter, wan and limp, he’d had his mask off; these people could have identified Peter, could have come after him time and time again if they’d wanted to. And now they couldn’t. She wasn’t going to waste her time feeling sorry about it.
Peter’s going to be mad about the murder, but he’s going to be even madder that the Avengers have seen his face. Jean isn’t too happy about it herself, honestly; Peter’s had enough taken from him, without his autonomy over his own identity being ripped away, but there’s nothing she can do about it now. They seem uncomfortable about it too, although it turns out that’s less about the autonomy thing, and more about Peter, as a person.
“Jesus,” Barnes breathed, looking like he’s going to be sick. “He’s just a kid.”
Yelena is busy removing Peter’s restraints, but she looks troubled. “He’s been doing this for a long time,” she says, half a statement and half a question, directed at Jean.
She answers without taking her eyes off Peter. “I don’t know how long, but he was in high school when it started.”
Barnes makes a noise like he’s been gutted. “The airport was years ago. He was Blipped too, right?” He asks Jean, and she nods. “Christ. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen when I first met him.”
“Fifteen, I think,” Jean says. Then, because Barnes looks like he’s about to be sick instead of doing anything useful, she snaps, “feel guilty about it later. Get him out of here first.”
He visibly steels himself, and helps Walker and Yelena pull Peter up. Jean follows them out, as close to Peter as she can get, and the second they have him in the van they’d all loaded in to when they pealed out to find him, she grabs his hand tight enough that no one could hope to pry her off. She doesn’t let go for a long, long time.
**
Peter wakes up in the Avengers med bay without his mask and, predictably, freaks the fuck out. Jean maybe should have pushed for them to put his mask back on and explain the situation later, but she didn’t want to lie to him. Watching him lose his shit over their friends finding out his first name is making her reevaluate that.
“You literally don’t exist on paper, Peter,” she hisses at him, after five minutes of watching him go on insane mental tangents. “Them knowing you’re a white guy in your twenties isn’t the end of the world.”
“It’s secret for a reason, Jean,” he grits back, like he knows he’s being unreasonable but isn’t prepared to stop any time soon.
“What exactly do you think they’re going to do with this information?” she asks, reminding herself that he’s literally recovering from a kidnapping in order to keep her tenuous hold over her temper. “We’ve been having dinner here every week for months. If they were planning on crossing you, they didn’t have to wait for you to be kidnapped. They could have just, I don’t know, followed you home.”
“I don’t-” Peter starts, but Jean is sick of this now. She feels like last thread of her patience snap.
“They helped,” she yells, and Peter falls silent fast. He’s looking at her with wide eyes, and it’s then she realises she’s tearing up again. “I asked them for help, and they didn’t even blink. They heard you were in trouble and they came before I even finished asking, and you’re worried they know what you look like?”
She’s breathing hard, and Peter is staring at her like he’s only just realising what the other side of his disappearance was like. Like he’s imagining what her last twenty-four hours looked like.
He reaches over and squeezes her hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, quiet. “You’re right. I’m glad they helped you.”
She squeezes back. “You’re so stupid,” she accuses. “They were helping both of us. Because they’re our friends, asshole. Even Barnes.”
He laughs at that. “Jesus, that’s a thought. Hell must have frozen over.”
Like saying his name had summoned him, the door opens, and Barnes is standing in the threshold. He comes in, followed closely by the rest of the team. Bob makes a beeline for Jean, holding a cup of something with steam coming out of it, pressing it into her hand, while Yelena is immediately at Peter’s side, fussing over him like he’s a kid. There’s a reason why these two are her favourites, Jean thinks, smiling into her mug.
“You’re okay?” Yelena asks, checking Peter’s eyes, like they’re not in a med bay where he’s undergone a battery of tests before he’d even woken up.
“Jeez, I’m fine,” Peter says, sounding like a teenager, batting her hand away from his face. “This isn’t my first rodeo, seriously.”
The rest of them turn sombre, and Jean sighs internally. She’d been hoping she wouldn’t be in the room when this came up.
“And when was your ‘first rodeo” exactly?” Barnes asks, intent and serious, and Jean watches Peter, who is much smarter than anyone really gives him credit for, realise what the question means.
“Ah,” He says, vaguely guilty. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag?”
Barnes looks like he kind of wants to strangle Peter a little. “Yeah, the cat’s out of the bag. What the hell? You’ve been doing this shit since you were a teenager?”
“Listen,” Peter says, clearly aiming for conciliatory and landing on slightly defensive, “in my defence, I was perfectly happy saving cats and helping old ladies cross the street before the Accords thing. I got drafted, man, what was I supposed to do? Say no?”
“Yes!” Barnes exclaims, throwing his hands up. “Obviously, yes! You were, what, fifteen? Steve dropped a goddamn shipping container on you!”
“I caught it,” Peter says, all the way to defensive now. “It was fine. It was actually a pretty fun fight, all things considered.”
“Fun?!” Bucky shouts, “You were fifteen, fighting the Avengers.”
“Fifteen, beating the Avengers, if memory serves,” Peter grins, and Jean has to hold very still to stop herself laughing out loud. Yelena doesn’t even bother restraining herself, and cackles loudly.
“Yeah, you beat us. Then you went to Titan, and fought Thanos,” Bucky counters, and everyone stops laughing. “We didn’t win that one, if memory serves.”
“Is there a point to this?” Peter asks, terse now, because they’re getting very close to a topic he won’t touch on, ever. Jean hears a lot about Tony Stark, but she has never once heard the details of what happened on Titan, or what happened when Thanos was killed, not from Peter.
“You don’t see the problem with a kid fighting a titan in space? Are you for real?”
“I don’t know what you expect me to say here.” Peter says, glaring a little. “I wanted to help, and anyway, it was years ago!”
Barnes points at him. “You were a child. You’d be cool with her going to space, fighting superheroes?” He points at Jean, and Peter looks visibly shocked. Like he’d never even conceptualised Jean’s age now with his age then, which Jean thinks is fairly typical of him as a person. He gives her a hell of a lot more grace than he’s ever given himself.
“You’re still a kid now,” Barnes continues, irate. “So, the next time you decide to fight a god, or get a building dropped on you, call us, for gods sake! You don’t have to go off by your damn self, trying to get yourself killed.”
Jean watches Peter absorb that, and immediately start to reject it, before he glances over at her. She can see that he knows he’s lost whatever argument he was concocting before he’s even opened his mouth. Jean has forced both of them into these people’s lives, and now, like it or not, Peter has people who have his back. He has a chance to have the kind of team he never had before, because the only available one had fallen apart in an airport in Germany just as he’d met them. He could have a safety net, something he hadn’t really had since Tony Stark died; and he could give that to Jean, too. She watches his rebuttal die in his throat.
“Fine,” he says, and some of the tension goes out of Barnes’ shoulders. “Fine, okay. I’ll call. If it makes you feel better.”
Barnes looks like he wants to object at length to that, and very visibly bites his tongue. Jean is a little impressed with his restraint, considering he’d been ranting about child soldiers on and off for hours before Peter woke up. Jean’s absolutely asking Peter what, exactly, happened at the airport that’s got Barnes so worked up; she has a feeling it’s going to be a funny story, at least from Peter’s perspective.
Yelena claps, making everyone jump. “Now we’re all on the same page,” she says, grinning, “I think introductions are in order?”
Peter blinks, then presses his lips together in a way that doesn’t hide the fact that he’s smiling one bit. “I guess they are.”
He looks around at the whole group of them, who had all come when Jean had called, who had all waited around in various states of anxiety for him to wake up, who cared that he’s been doing this alone for so long that he hadn’t even realised he didn’t have to anymore. Peter looks at Jean last; she smiles at him, because she had him, and he had her, and now they got to have everyone else too.
Peter turns back to the group, and grins.
“My name’s Peter. Peter Parker.”