Chapter Text
Tony thought he’d planned for everything.
Between bouts of combing through NYPD tactical frequencies and digging up increasingly unsettling intel in the Punisher files, it’d helped to step back and work on filling in the more glaring holes in Peter’s future to assure himself the kid would still be alive to have one. He started by double-checking that he hadn’t repurposed the quarters he set aside for Peter a few months back before recalling how adamant the kid had been when he turned him down. As far as Tony knows, the sentiment hasn't changed. Friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man doesn't quite mesh when said neighborhood is an hour's drive away on a good day in New York traffic, and that's only addressing the Spider-Man part.
The Peter part is… messier, if he’s putting it lightly. A clusterfuck, if he’s putting it accurately, but he’s making the effort to be optimistic. Hiring a tutor would be easy enough, though taking away the structure high school provides after everything else Peter had taken away doesn’t sit right with him. And if Tony did opt for that route, it wouldn’t take an observant classmate of Peter’s to note he left Queens at the same time Spider-Man did. The kid’s already had enough secret identity debacles to last a lifetime. If he wants to maintain it, the least Tony can do is make sure putting the pieces together isn’t any easier than it’d been for him.
The conclusions that follow are A) he and Pepper are going to have to really play up their engagement if he wants to keep everything else under wraps and B) Queens is a lot quieter than Tony’s used to. Not that he’s complaining; Pepper never saw the Avengers Compound as a home, and as of four months ago, Tony doubts he ever could. So if this penthouse of the building he bought out is a whole five minutes away from the compound as the Mark 47 flies, that suits him just fine.
All things considered, he probably should have seen the cold shoulder coming.
The kid’s resolute, he’ll give him that. He was sure Peter would be over it come morning, but it was Tony who relented to leave the kitchen when the kid made it clear he’d rather starve himself than exist in the same room. The fact that Tony returned to a stack of clean dishes either means that at least the kid’s not pissed off enough to be petty, or it isn’t simply pissed off that has him acting out. Given that the only other clue Peter offers comes in the form of a door Tony has to actively resist the urge to unlock (establishing boundaries is good), he doesn’t anticipate figuring it out anytime soon.
Then again, a pissed-off Spider-Man isn’t new to him. Peter barrelled headfirst into an argument after the ferry fiasco, though Tony can see how a week between a lawyer and the Punisher can stifle a penchant for talking back.
Whatever the reason, Peter still had to have seen the adoption forms on the counter.
The line where the kid’s signature goes isn’t any less blank.
Tony runs a hand down his face. It’s not a coincidence the kid picked up the shunning act right after Tony said something Peter didn’t like about his kidnapper. It’s far from the smartest play if he wants Tony to buy that he doesn’t have Stockholm Syndrome, though odds are his actions have less to do with smart and more to do with the fucking Stockholm Syndrome.
If Castle’s goal was to keep Spider-Man from ever turning him in, mission accomplished. It’s not Spider-Man Castle has to worry about.
Of the two ways Castle could’ve got Peter off his case, at least he picked the one that isn’t permanent. Tony had FRIDAY compile a list of the best child psychiatrists New York has to offer, yet he hadn’t even been halfway through relaying it to Pepper before she cut him off.
“I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, but Tony,” she’d started, locking his gaze with that same doleful look she’d been giving him every sleepless night prior, “he’s not something you can fix.”
Before, he would’ve taken that as a challenge. Now, he’s stuck hovering outside a pissed-off teenager’s door on the off chance this won’t end with Tony pissing him off more. Not to fix, but to…
Well, he’s bound to figure that out soon enough.
Tony raps a knuckle against the wood.
“Hey, kid.” He waits a moment for a response that won’t come. “Think we could talk?”
Expecting the silence does nothing to ease the sinking disappointment in his stomach.
“I, ah, get that you’re committed to the vow of silence, but I really need to-” Tony clicks his tongue against his teeth. Shit, does that sound mocking? That’s the last thing he needs, but he’s not sure how the hell he’s meant to navigate the proverbial minefield with a door as a substitute for Peter’s face. “Five minutes. Just give me five minutes to hash things out.”
The door stays in place.
Damn. He didn’t think he’d need a monologue ready. Maybe he should’ve known better than to assume he was walking into a conversation. “You gotta give me something, kid. I can’t be halfway through my heart-to-heart when I find out you have headphones on.”
Had he—? Yes, Tony did try out the silent treatment on his dad, once. Once, because Howard hadn’t seemed to notice a difference.
Tony raises his hand for a second knock, yet before he gets the chance, the knob clicks.
He takes a deft step back as the door swings open. Relief expands in his chest, then warps into something else when the kid opts to stare straight past him instead of meeting his eyes. There’s no trace of the fiery glare from back in the car, which Tony would almost prefer over the flat expression Peter has on now. The kid doesn’t say a word before he turns back into his room, leaving the door gaping behind him.
Tony takes it as an invitation, which must be the right call given that he’s not greeted by a faceful of webbing the second he steps inside. Instead, he’s met with a mountain of unopened boxes in the corner and a bedroom that’s only a bedroom in the most literal sense of the word. He has to withhold a huff when his gaze flits past Murdock’s jacket hanging off the bedpost, but it’s less grating when he notes that Peter’s changed out of whatever clothes Castle grabbed for him in favor of his Midtown Tech sweatshirt. The kid plants himself on the edge of the bed, his eyes firmly fixed on anything that isn’t Tony.
“Still haven’t unpacked?” Tony skims a hand along the edge of the nearest box and suppresses a grimace when the implications of his words simmer in Peter’s silence. “That’s all right. No rush.”
Nothing. Peter doesn’t so much as twitch.
“I’ve got your suit up in the workshop,” he tries, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he surveys the boxes. “I’ll admit I debated scrapping it for a Mark Three, but it’s not beyond a patch-up. We’re probably looking at a Mark Two-point-five if your AI keeps checking out of the mask. Apropos of that…”
Tony crosses the room once he’s eighty percent sure he’s identified the right box and pries it open to find the white goggles staring up at him. He unfolds the hoodie over the top of the box, but when he steps aside to ensure the kid can see, Peter doesn’t bother with even a glance in his direction.
“I had to make Happy go back for Mark One. He was using his lying voice when he told me he remembered it.”
Peter’s never passed up the chance to ask about his suit before, yet the clenching of his jaw and the flash in his eyes indicate he knows that’s exactly what Tony was vying for.
C’mon, Stark. Peter let him in for a reason. Maybe all he wants is for Tony to take back what he said last night, but in the case he wants something that Tony can actually-
Tony’s thoughts scatter as his eyes drift beyond the jacket on the bedpost to the framed photograph on the nightstand beside it.
May has her temple resting on the uncle’s shoulder with her arms around his torso. Laugh lines reside at the corner of her eyes that Tony can’t recall on her face. The uncle’s hands encircle the ankles of the little boy perched atop his shoulders, tiny forearms pressing into matching brown hair. All three of them are beaming into the camera. The frame is angled toward the pillow and the way the light hits the glass exposes the fingerprints around their faces that Tony doubts were there before.
Pepper is right.
There’s no fixing this.
Tony drums his fingers against the cardboard, steels himself, then gets out, “I was nineteen when my parents died.”
Peter doesn’t shift as much as the air around him does. That stubbornness wavers in favor of surprise when his gaze darts to Tony’s face. Perhaps it’s a good thing he remembers he’s supposed to be shunning Tony a moment later, because Tony’s not sure he could meet his eyes back.
“Not that I was ever standing,” Tony waves a hand in Peter’s direction, “sitting where you are,” he amends, making an effort to keep his casual tone. “I was grown-up enough that I didn't have to worry about—” Obadiah, most likely “—some jackass taking me in and trying to change how I live my life. God, I’d have hated that.”
Thank the stars he’d been nineteen, come to think of it, because it was almost too late for Tony by the time he found out he’d never been more than a golden goose to the man. If things had played out differently and he’d wound up in Obadiah’s custody… Tony curls his fingers over the edge of the box and leans back, gritting his teeth as he forces his attention away from Murdock’s accusation ringing unbidden in the back of his brain. Hell, as far as he knows, the lawyer put the same thing in Peter’s head, too.
“I was a smart kid. Everyone could see it. Bright future, lotta potential.” He eyes Peter out of his periphery. “Maybe I’d start wondering if that’s the reason they want me around.”
“How would you know that it’s not?”
It’s quiet and directed more at the ground than Tony’s face. It does nothing to diminish the blow. The way the kid finally speaks has this feeling less like a victory and more like a pang where the arc reactor used to be, and Tony’s not sure if his shrug manages to cover it up. “Guess I’d have to give them a chance to prove it.”
Peter scoffs.
The sound is cold and scathing and unlike anything Tony’s heard from the kid before. But before he can suss out what it’s stemming from, Peter dips his head and closes his eyes. He opens them after letting out a slow exhale through his nose, then takes a breath that leaves Tony holding his own until the kid finally speaks.
“One of my friends… she’s really into, like, true crime stuff,” he starts. “She knows a lot. And she was telling me about this case she was reading up on one time, and—” Peter wets his lips “—and Stockholm Syndrome came up.”
Tony’s heart sinks in his chest.
“She said it's based in survival instincts. The more someone cooperates with their kidnapper, the less likely their kidnapper will hurt them, right? So they play nice, their captor hurts them less, and their subconscious tricks them into thinking that that means they’re a good person.” Peter meets Tony’s eyes. “I was never afraid of Frank Castle hurting me. And I didn't exactly play nice.”
“Is that what you think?” Tony asks carefully. “That he’s a good person?”
Peter can’t hold his gaze.
And to think he was naïve enough to believe that they’d both want to bury the hatchet. “Kid-”
“Mr. Stark- He wasn’t even my kidnapper, okay? Not really. I chose to lie low with him because it was the best way to keep my friends safe. And after he stitched me up, the first thing he did was give me a phone so I could call my parents to pick me up. He- He didn’t know about them, but if he wanted me for bait, he wouldn’t have-”
“He didn’t know about them?”
Peter’s brow furrows.
“Castle drugged you,” Tony spells out, but Peter either can’t or won’t put the pieces together himself. “Kid, you can’t know what you told him.”
For a split second Peter’s expression twists back to what it was in the car, yet the next second all that remains of it is a muscle popping in his jaw and a voice too even to hint at what’s going on in his head. “You don’t know him. I know you think you do, but you don’t.”
The gigabytes the Castle folder takes up on his hard drive would suggest otherwise.
“Back in the parking garage—he wasn’t going to pull the trigger. I knew he wasn’t gonna pull the trigger.” A tinge of desperation creeps into the kid’s tone; maybe because he needs Tony to believe him, maybe because he needs to believe himself. “He was just- I went behind his back to set it up. And if he hadn’t shown up when he did- He was scared.”
Last he checked the footage, Castle wasn’t the one crying on the ground after a face-to-face meeting with a Glock 19. “Were you?”
“Not of him shooting me,” Peter snaps, then quickly reels himself back with the visible rise and fall of his chest. “Mr. Stark, I’m not defending him. He apologized, so he didn’t-”
The remark slips past Tony’s lips. “Well, if he apologized-”
“I’m not saying that makes it okay. I know it doesn’t make it okay!” Peter rises with his voice. “But he apologized and that means something to me.”
Shit. They’re veering right back to where they were in the car and Peter’s not giving him the window to change course.
“You- You can’t tell me what happened. You weren’t there.” The kid’s bottom lip trembles as he strides into Tony’s space. “You thought I was ready to be an Avenger. But now, since I’m just a fifteen-year-old kid, you expect me to believe I’m a pawn to Mr. Castle because the only people who could ever give a shit about me are dead or you!”
Tony doesn’t get the chance to slam the brakes before they crash.
A shaky breath escapes Peter’s mouth and Tony can see the whites of his eyes, yet the kid does nothing to keep the diatribe reverberating around them from rooting them both to the spot.
Every protest and rationalization swirling in Tony’s head from a moment ago scatters when he tries to summon one to his tongue. Peter, for his part, manages to falter back onto the mattress. In the swelling silence between them, all the kid does is dart his eyes to the picture frame before averting them to his lap.
For all the bullshit the Punisher forced into Peter’s skull, it’s not ‘I was wrong about Frank Castle’ that the kid needs to hear.
Tony takes a slow step forward. When the kid doesn’t react, he keeps stepping forward until he’s at the edge of the bed. He’s pushing his luck, but as he lowers himself to sit, Peter doesn’t shy away.
That little boy looks nothing like the teenager beside him.
“I’m sorry, Pete.”
Peter’s head snaps up.
“Avenger, not an Avenger... I thought I’d be, uh,” Tony fishes for the right words as the kid traps him in those brown doe-eyes, “picking up where your aunt left off. Dig up a Peter Parker manual she had stashed away.”
They're not the right words, not if the small line in Peter’s brow is any indication. Regardless, it doesn’t change that he wouldn't pass up a Peter Parker manual about now. He’d been in Spider-Man’s company for the whole of ten minutes the last time they were sat like this, and that’s all it took for him to piece together what made that kid tick. This kid…
No. Even if Castle’s right, even if that kid isn’t there anymore, he’s not about to abandon this one.
“I don’t know what she’d do.” Tony nods at the picture. “I can only do… what I think is right.”
It’s different this time, when Peter looks away. For the first time since Tony entered the room, the kid unfurls. His throat bobs as he swallows and his eyes scrunch up before he’s looking at the wall like he’s seeing something else.
Tony follows his gaze.
Once, for the worst five minutes of his life, he thought he saw Pepper die. She’d slipped past his grip into the inferno below because he wasn’t able to catch her, because of his enemies and his fuck-ups. For one of those five minutes, between the falling and the explosions and the flames, he thought he’d killed the man who killed her. For one of those five minutes, Pepper was avenged.
Being an Avenger never felt so hollow.
He’d been too charred and chock-full of adrenaline for the what now question to really sink in. It was only after he started wondering if he might've been grateful his Malibu home was reduced to rubble if only to ensure that he wouldn’t have to see her name on the collar of that stuffed rabbit. All the paintings on the walls he’d purchased because of the way she eyed them, the bottle of citrus shampoo in their shower, her steady stash of Greek yogurt in the fridge—he’d have burned the house down himself if it meant he didn’t have to extract every piece of her from it.
Not that it’d make a difference. Not when he doesn’t know if he’d still wipe his shoes every time he exits the workshop when he only made it a habit to stop her from chastising him for tracking grease around. She doesn’t have to be a ghost to haunt him.
Pepper knows this, for the most part. She does what she can.
May Parker doesn’t have a say in how she haunts her kid.
“She set my curfew for ten.” Peter reaches for the picture frame to fold it face-down on his lap. “She was gonna move it to eleven when I turned sixteen.”
Tony gives a slow nod. “We can do that.”
“She, um, she also said that I had to have my homework done before going out. She’s- She was strict about that.”
“Mm, you’ll regret sharing that one. I’ll get FRIDAY on your back, too. We’ll be insufferable.”
There’s a tug at the corner of Peter’s mouth. It’s a start.
“How about it?” Tony places his palms on his thighs, preparing to stand. “Think you’re ready to sign those forms?”
Peter wrings his hands and the pit grows in Tony’s stomach. “I want to go over it with Matt first.”
God, this internship’s going to be the death of him. “It’s the standard form. There aren’t any Spider-Man clauses, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“No, I know, I just-” Peter breaks off to meet his eyes. “I want to talk with him about it.”
He doesn’t need the undertone in Peter’s voice to know this is a test. Still, despite ample evidence to the contrary, Murdock’s not an idiot. Whether the lawyer has it out for him or not, he can’t deny that Tony’s the best option the kid has. “Sure. I’ll call. Set up a meeting.”
His answer passes. The kid’s shoulders dip as he gives a series of tiny nods. When Tony gets to his feet, Peter stands with him.
“I’m feeling Chinese. You feeling Chinese?”
“Yeah,” Peter says. “Yeah, I can do Chinese.”
If his tone is anything to go by, the kid just might be able to do it at the dining table this time. Tony taps at the frame of his glasses. “FRIDAY, you get that?”
“Already on it. ETA is thirty-four minutes.”
“Chinese. Thirty-four minutes,” Tony relays as he turns for the door. “You haven’t met Pepper. Have you met Pepper? She’ll be back before-”
A crash stops him dead in his tracks.
Tony’s watch is almost a gauntlet by the time he jolts back around.
There’s no shattered window and there’s no missile at his feet. There’s only the picture frame on the floor under Peter’s loose palm, fissures spiderwebbing across the pane.
“Shit,” Tony breathes. He doubles back for the picture, but Peter beats him to it. The kid snaps into action to snatch the frame the second Tony reaches out.
The hairs on the back of his neck are standing straight up.
“Hey, you okay?”
Peter’s response comes in the form of a creased brow and open-mouthed breaths. His eyes are fixed on the picture, though Tony can’t decide if he’s staring at it or through it.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll replace the pane-”
“It’s fine,” Peter interrupts, blinking rapidly as he lays the frame on the nightstand. “I mean- Yeah. Thanks. But the photo’s okay. I’m fine.”
It takes approximately three seconds for the bullshit coming out of the kid’s mouth to register to his own ears.
“Sorry,” Peter rubs at the base of his skull, “I just-”
Peter breaks off when he’s unable to conjure an excuse in the brief window there would be any hope that Tony might buy it. Shit, this isn’t an anxiety attack, is it? By the looks of him, it might be the tail end of one. At least, as far as Tony can tell, because he’s only ever dealt with those from the receiving end. Upon which Pepper would grab his hand, tell him to breathe, and ask him if he wanted to talk about it on the off chance the answer would stop being I’m fine.
Tony takes a step toward the kid and tries to ignore the twinge in his chest as Peter matches it with a step back.
“You wanna talk about it?” The words feel foreign on his tongue.
“I’m okay, Mr. Stark. Really.”
Peter’s still rubbing the back of his neck.
“Okay,” Tony decides. He faces back to the door and blows out a silent breath through his nose. “I’ll grab you in thirty.”
“Thirty-two,” FRIDAY corrects.
“Thirty-two,” he amends. “I was rounding. You knew I was rounding.”
With that, save for a final glance at the kid, Tony exits into the hallway. Not ten seconds pass before the door clicks shut behind him.
Tony presses his spine against the wall and tilts back his head.
Dammit.
It felt like progress for a minute there. It is progress, objectively, because if nothing else, speaking terms beats non-speaking terms any day of the week. He didn’t count on getting even that far, so it stands to reason he shouldn’t feel like he just took one step forward and two steps back.
He doesn’t need the fact that something slipped out of Spider-Man’s grip to know the kid isn’t fine. Understatement of the fucking century. He knows it, Peter knows it, and the only thing pressing him about it would do is send Tony straight back to square one.
Better known as right outside of Peter’s locked door.
When Tony was eight—seven, on second thought—he built his first robot. Granted, not his first, but the first one actually complex enough to warrant his scribbled-up blueprints. Dad’s steadfast no dogs policy combined with Tony’s Space Race phase paved the road to a solution Tony called Fido. Fido resembled a Rover more than anything else, albeit at a much more house-friendly size and programmed with markedly more fun commands. He could sit, stay, fetch, and spent about four months heeling at Tony's ankles before getting into an altercation with the wheels of his dad’s Cadillac.
Unlike most dogs, Fido couldn’t have been sent to a farm upstate. Jarvis broke the news to him, assured him it was an accident, and waited for his eyes to dry before fetching his dad. Howard had frowned at him before offering up a stiff apology, then asked if Tony was all right. With tear-stained cheeks, Tony had said yes.
Howard gave a single nod and left the room.
It’s not too late for Tony to step back in.
“Boss,” FRIDAY murmurs, “I just received signal from StarkWatch Eleven. No heartbeat detected.”
Shit.
Tony turns on his heels and beelines for the kitchen.
He all but throws his phone on the counter, the impact barely audible over the thundering of his pulse. He swipes at the holographic display until it matches the watch with a face and a name just recognizable enough to assure him Frank Castle fucked up.
Provided that’s not what Castle wants him to think.
The StarkWatches function as alarm bells, sure, but Tony never really imagined them to be anything more than deterrents. Castle’s been made aware of what they’re capable of and Tony can’t see him willing to cross out the names near the bottom of his list if it means he has to forgo the one at the top. If Tony’s lucky, Castle had already offed Gargan and it just slipped past his radar. More likely, this is a torture session gone overboard. Even more likely…
Tony taps at the location pin and presses his palms onto the counter, leaning in as each second drags out longer than the last. When the map calibrates, Tony blinks, straightens, and then blinks again.
“FRIDAY, refresh it. It’s saying Keeseville.”
“That’s because it is Keeseville.”
A street-view image of a small, dilapidated house pops up to further FRIDAY’s point.
One of Castle’s safehouses, then. Just under three hundred miles north of the city—about ten minutes as the Iron Man flies. Barely enough time to get the hell out of Dodge if one knows what they’re doing, but not enough time to avoid every traffic camera while doing it.
Or more than enough time to hide and wait.
“What are we at, FRIDAY? Thirty minutes?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“So ten minutes there, ten minutes back, and eight minutes to find him,” Tony muses. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a trap.”
Tony hums. “Draw up a flight plan.”
With one last glimpse down the hallway, Tony strides for the roof-access door.
He makes it in nine.
The house has seen better days. The siding looks like it used to be beige once upon a time, but it's far too mottled now for Tony to say for sure. The roof is an abandoned patchwork of shingles and he can count at least two boarded-up window frames on the face of the house alone. The neighboring homes aren't in much better shape. Overall, a solid place to dispatch a lowlife no one would miss. A less solid place to take out Iron Man, but Tony’s been met with worse.
Castle has to know that a rifle through the window won’t do him any good. Explosives are a safer bet. Far from original, but it's the best he could reasonably pull off without getting creative. Doesn't change the fact a rigged building is a one-trick pony, and Castle doesn't seem the type to put all his stock in something so predictable. Black market alien tech is the only thing Tony can come up with that he might have to worry about, and while he has no doubt Castle could get his hands on some if he wanted to, whether or not he would be willing to use such a volatile weapon is a different matter entirely.
Tony lands on the sidewalk to the front door. He anticipates a hail of gunfire and is greeted by a rabbit bolting at his feet.
He's just able to stop himself from firing a repulsor blast at the thing as it vanishes into the bushes.
“FRIDAY, give me an IR scan.”
For a second his vision blacks out, only to be replaced by the faint outline of the house in front of him. It's barely any warmer than the frigid air outside, save for a faint, misshapen glow coming from what Tony wagers is the basement.
He tries and fails to get a sense of the glow's outline. “What are we thinkin’, FRI?”
“Temperature readings indicate that it's not warm enough to be a human heat signature.”
Well, not a living one. “Do me a favor and ping Watch Eleven.”
Tony's vision returns to normal as he makes his way up the front steps. He eyes the door frame for wiring, finds none, then aims his palm at the wall and blasts a hole where the window used to be.
When the dust clears, Tony's met with a misnomer of a living room. It's practically desolate save for a couch not even a junkyard could love facing a TV stand sans TV. Cobwebs layer upon themselves in the corners and grime is embedded so deeply in the carpet that it’s reason enough for Tony to stay in his suit. Slowly, Tony treads past the threshold and into the room.
“You auditioning for another Dateline special, Castle?” Tony calls, giving the space a once-over, then a twice-over.
No response. He has yet to determine if that's for the better or not.
“Check all traffic cams in a five-mile radius for any cars in the past fifteen minutes,” Tony decides. “Actually, make that ten miles. Run the plates against NYC cameras up to forty-eight hours ago until you get a match. And put the ping on max volume.”
FRIDAY’s affirmation comes in the form of a creeping percentage bar on his HUD and rhythmic beeping from below his boots.
Slowly, Tony paces a tight circle around the perimeter of the living room, turning the corner the second time around to find a closed door with bloodied fingerprints decorating the knob. Tony's hardly surprised, but the knot still tightens in his stomach. Castle's not being subtle.
What was it Mahoney said? Something about the parking garage massacre being an outlier for the Punisher’s MO, something about how he mowed down the Kitchen Irish and Dogs of Hell. Didn't waste any time making it clean.
This isn't clean.
The percentage bar reads twenty percent.
“How are we on the takeout ETA?” Tony asks, narrowing his eyes at the door.
“Fifteen minutes, boss.”
Tony grabs the knob and twists.
The intensity of the beeping increases twofold as a wooden staircase descends before him. He can barely make out the cement beyond the door frame at the bottom. If the basement has any windows, they're well blacked out. Also not a surprise, given that Tony’s approximately twenty feet from a fresh corpse in the worst game of Hot and Cold he's ever played in his life. He charges up his repulsor and holds his palm out in front of him, following the blood spatters on his way down.
It’s only when he’s a step away from the ground that, past the beeping and the high-pitched whine, he makes out the faint trickling of water.
Tony frowns. He aims his repulsor around the basement, over the dusty boarded-up windows and the corpse-less unfinished floor, and pauses on the ajar fuse box in the corner that he’d pay more than a glance if he weren’t on a time crunch. As is, the steady beeping and trail of blood coming from behind the opposite door seem like a surefire sign he’s about to find what he’s looking for.
“Last chance to play nice,” Tony says. “Or don’t. Your funeral.”
He half hopes the door will open with a storm of bullets. Instead, Tony opens it to a running shower and a dangling body.
Tony braced himself, but there’s only so much bracing can do. The outline is blurred through the frosted glass door, which isn’t tall enough to obscure the limp wrists handcuffed to the showerhead or the blinking StarkWatch. A thick electrical cord is closed in the shower door near the ground, and Tony traces it back to where it’s plugged into an adjacent wall. Water and a live wire might've disagreed with his suit some years back, but one Ivan Vanko was a massive assist in mending that. He yanks the cord free, notes how it ends in frayed wires and jagged plastic, then opens the glass door.
The percentage bar reads seventy-five percent.
Tony swallows to rid the dryness from the back of his throat as he turns off the shower valve on the opposite wall. It’s distinctly out of the poor bastard’s reach, what with his strung-up hands and bound ankles. His feet are bare and there’s a dishtowel over his mouth tied at the back of his head. It’s stained red on the side from a scrape on his temple and accompanied by a whole rainbow of bruises on his face.
Jesus Christ.
“Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Cavella,” FRIDAY says quietly. “He has a warrant for sexual assault and felony murder.”
“That tracks,” Tony mutters. It’s about the only thing that tracks. Castle has zero qualms with headshots. This is creative. He took all the time and effort to rig this up without giving a shit about leaving behind bloody fingerprints on the door. “C’mon FRIDAY, where are we at with the plates?”
“I’ve almost finished,” she placates, then, “Zero matches.”
Tony blinks. “Zero?”
That can’t be right. Unless Castle hotwired a different car for the trip back. But he’d have to have done that before Cavella’s death, and Tony can’t place how-
His eyes drift to the electrical cord and his blood runs cold.
Right between the plug end of the cord and the wall outlet is an electric timer.
A quick look over the clock face confirms the timer was programmed to activate about fifteen minutes ago. Tony could’ve figured that. What has his breath catching in his throat is that it was programmed to stay off for five hours until then.
“FRIDAY,” he asks, trying to keep the tremble out of his jaw, “how long is the drive from Keeseville to the city?”
“Just under five hours.”
His vision tunnels.
Tony flies up the stairway and blasts a hole through the roof. In thirty seconds the house is entirely shrouded by the heavy clouds.
“Check- Check the city. Social media, police frequencies. Anything that could point to Castle,” he rushes out.
“On it,” FRIDAY says. “Reports indicate the fire alarm at the Milton Hotel in Long Island City was triggered seventeen minutes ago. More officers and fire are en route.”
“The hell does that have to do with Castle?”
“I can't say, boss. But this traffic footage was captured ten minutes ago from two blocks away.”
A busy street corner pops up at the edge of his HUD. It’s just the congestion of a normal New York street in the afternoon, and Tony’s about to ask what he’s supposed to be looking at before a streak of red and blue obscures the camera before it swings away.
Tony’s heart drops to his stomach.