Maybe the paralysis extended to my left arm.

Peter opens his eyes and sees that, nope. It's just asleep. The static feeling of blood rushing back is wildly exciting, after weeks of unconsciousness.

Feeling things is annoying! I love it!

Peter glances to the side at Steve, dead to the world. In the night time dark, lights shut off, his bruises are somehow more noticeable. Calico splotches decorate his face and arms. Purples, yellow, greens. Peter didn't even know bruises could be green.

There are more under the hospital gown. More hairline fractures than Peter can fathom. One gargantuan welt mars Steve's hairline beneath the bandages, coupled with a compound concussion that nearly cracked his skull.

Tony did all this. With his bare hands.

It's a petrifying thought.

In a suite down the hall, Tony's got a matching set.

It's shaken Peter so to his core that his mind can't swallow it, the reality that his parents will fight each other, given the right motivation.

Sure, he's seen them slay any bad guy of the week. Sometimes with vicious prejudice.

But this…this is something far more sinister.

Peter rolls the images around in his head, the way Tony's eyes were saturated with blood lust. He juxtaposes it with Tony giving Steve a bad sweater at Christmas and how they'd fall asleep all over each other on movie nights.

He hides his face in Steve's side when the tears finally come.

I need to see him, Peter thinks. I need to know what happened.

There's no concern about being ginger with Steve this concussed. They've woken him every few hours to check lucidity and thankfully he's out of the woods for brain damage. He sleeps on even with Peter's jostling.

Sam's snoring away on a cot against the opposite wall, back to Peter.

Peter manages to get off the bed. He's an ice cream cone on a hot summer's day, his body melting straight onto the floor. He might as well have pool noodles for legs.

Okay. Crawling. I can work with this.

Which is exactly what he does, fumbling on all fours through the open doorway and down the hall.

"Mr. Parker," says Friday softly. "Would you like me to wake Mr. Wilson so he can bring you a wheelchair?"

"No, no. Thanks, Fri. I've got this."

Peter stops at the private suit. To his shock, Tony's hospital bed is empty. The sheets are pulled back, as if he got up recently.

Peter shakes his head, mournful again, and keeps going until he turns a corner—

Bucky?

The man doesn't notice him right away, eyes closed. He's not sleeping, however, not with the too-even rise and fall of his chest and the stiff line of his jaw.

It's like Bucky is forcing himself to be still.

Peter wonders abruptly why they didn't put him with Steve. The two deserve it, after all they've been through.

Bucky's room is smaller than all the others and there are strange mechanisms on the windows. Even Peter, for all his advanced knowledge, doesn't have a clue what they are, which is a glaring advertisement for the fact Tony designed them.

"Who's there?" Bucky's eyes flit around. His voice is rough from the bruises along his windpipe. "I can hear someone breathing."

"Down here."

Bucky cranes his head around the side of the bed. "Peter?"

Peter wishes Bucky would help him up already, would reach down with his one muscly arm and pull him to standing.

Then he sees the Kevlar strap around Bucky's wrist, chained to the bed rail.

Oh.

Peter again glances at the two-pronged devices on the windows. "You're being kept as a prisoner?"

Bucky sounds tired. "I did some bad things, Peter. I'm a…a danger to everyone here. Tony called the UN and they're picking me up."

Nose wrinkling, Peter makes a disgusted face. "You saved my life! You protected me from Zemo."

There's a long pause while Bucky eyes the ceiling. "Did I, though?"

Peter, dumbfounded, has no reply to that.

"You should go, malysh. Tony doesn't want you near me."

"The Winter Soldier wasn't you." Peter licks his lips, nervous for some reason when he finally gets Bucky to meet his eyes. "You were brainwashed, right? Bucky Barnes would never have assassinated people."

Those whispered conversations he's overheard have been very insightful.

"Maybe not. But I was a sniper long before that."

Peter reaches up for the bed rail. Almost there…

"Yeah," he says around a wheeze of effort. "But you only shot bad guys during the war, right?"

It's Bucky turn to keep silent.

"You deserve a medal, not a jail cell."

Bucky's eyes fill with an emotion Peter doesn't have a name for right away. It's grey, the nothing kind of sorrow of half eaten food and evacuated houses.

"I don't deserve anything except death for what I've done." Bucky's voice drops to something breathless. "I remember them all, every face I've ever killed, regardless of age or station."

Peter gives up trying to stand and sits there, pale. Images of a muzzled figure, that he'd seen in the Russian file and never understood, haunt him now. They're the same man as the one strapped to this bed.

He comes to a sudden realization.

"I'm not afraid of you."

Bucky locks eyes with him again.

"Even knowing you killed people," Peter insists. "Because that wasn't you. You fed me on Zemo's plane. You jumped through a window and let yourself get injured. You were willing to shoot Steve point blank to protect me."

Peter feels the burn of tears in his throat again. "You are Bucky, my friend."

Bucky's mouth drops open. Peter's never seen him truly stunned and he relishes the humanity of the expression.

The soldier's eyes, however, fix just over Peter's shoulder.

Peter turns in barely enough time to see the calloused hands reaching for him. Tony snatches him up and quickly backs away, setting Peter in a wheelchair with such force the boy bounces.

Tony's voice is a hot stream of fire. "Stay away from my son."

Peter gasps. "Tony!"

"He came to me, Stark."

Frustrated, Peter tugs on the back of Tony's bath robe, careful to avoid the bulky bandages where they pulled glass out of his shoulder blades. "What is going on? He's not going to hurt me!"

Tony glances briefly back at Peter and then throws a vulcanized look at Bucky. "It's not his fist I'm worried about."

Bucky, pliable up to this point, stiffens into a hard silhouette. "You can do whatever you want to me, Stark. But don't you dare insinuate that I would put false ideas in Peter's head or lie about what happened, that I don't care about him just as much as you do."

Tony growls in his throat.

"I'd keep him safe if it cost me my life," Bucky finishes, muted.

The expression that morphs slowly across Tony's face is one Peter never forgets until his dying day. It's the white agony of men before they die, limbs being torn in two different directions in such savage pain that they plead for death. It is a swan song that ripples Tony's brows and sends his mouth into an S twist, jaw pulsing.

Peter, for one unearthly moment, gets a glimpse of Tony as a much younger man.

It's ghastly. It's too much. Peter wishes at once that he'd never seen it.

"Forgive me if I don't believe you," Tony whispers.

A dark hand grips Tony's shoulder, both comforting and restraining. Peter looks up at Rhodes, also pained. Pepper and Sam stand at the door.

"I'm taking Peter with me." Tony's face blackens. "I'm going to Malibu and we're getting away from here."

"Honey," says Pepper. "You can't take Peter away from his family. It's not healthy, not to mention illegal—"

"Like hell I can't!"

Rhodes sighs. "He isn't cleared to fly yet, Tones."

"Then we'll drive! Anything to put some distance here."

Peter has had enough.

He punches his fist against the arm rest, hard. The adults whirl on him.

"Stop it! Tony—you heard what I said to Bucky and I know you know it's true. Why can't you treat him like what he is, a victim?"

The whites of Tony's eyes flash. "Peter—"

"I know he killed people, but so did Natasha and you have no problem trusting her!"

Tony swiftly goes down in a crouch. "Peter, believe it or not, I'm objective enough to get that. But it's…it's more complicated than that."

"How?"

Tony's eyes flare, haunted. "It's who he killed, specifically, Pete."

Peter's blood pressure must be sky high, he recognizes this. But for how worked up he is, he understands that he might not want to know the answer to this mystery. Like the ending of a horror movie when the truth is revealed and everyone dies.

It chills him.

"Please," Peter whispers, not even sure what he's begging for. "Please, Tony."

I just want everything to be the way it was. I want us to be a family.

"I'm sorry, Pete." And Tony seems it, voice wobbly and eyes wet. "It's not even Barnes I have the biggest issue with. Steve lied. Lied for a long time about something really important."

Peter burns with helplessness and frustration. "You're all about second chances. That could be the Avengers motto for how true it is of everyone in this building. This is just like that, right?"

Tony's eyes are old fashioned sad now, full to bursting with heartache. His voice is gentle and Peter hates it. "Not this time, Pete. I'm sorry."