Nerve-wracking. Stressful.

Two words that Peter would've been tempted to use at that moment.

Truth was, he was feeling more than a bit of cabin fever. He wanted out. Walls were confining - stifling in a way he hadn't truly appreciated until he began swinging through a significant portion of his free time. It required a lot of thought, he would admit, and the beginning had involved plenty of mishaps: falling, web-snapping, and ever-so-fun trips through billboards. There were days when his joints ached when he got home, screamed at him as he slowly retreated back to his apartment. Sound got worse those days. The people around him felt like a challenge; a big fat question of the whole concept of Spiderman. The compound, though? It had none of that.

It had a silence as pristine as its walls. Quality that flooded through the large, spotless windows, in the form of sunlight that could only do so much against the rapidly falling temperatures. All of it was compounded by the grey skies that had set up camp, unchanging and increasingly oppressive. Peter found himself stuck with a combination of exasperation at himself (he had a PS4, XBOX One, and three LEGO sets that easily surpassed $150, seriously, how could he complain?) and a biting awareness of just how deep in he was.

The avengers knew his name. They knew his identity. He could never be anonymous anymore. Spiderman would be inextricably linked with Earth's Mightiest Heroes, whether he liked it or not. It drove home to him just how big this was, despite the fact that he was so small in comparison to all of them. He was just a kid in Goodwill sweatpants and a hoodie; the most advanced stuff about his suit was taken from an iphone and stuff that he took from his school's chem lab (Sorry Mr. Morita). Everything here was amazing; towering in a way that was truly sunk in when Mr. Rogers (Captain America? Steve? The man said he wanted to be called Steve…) took him to one of their "smaller" training areas, which was easily the size of his apartment, let alone - this was just so weird. And awesome. And kinda intimidating. Okay, very intimidating.

Peter pinched the bridge of his nose, letting out a long breath.

This was all fine of course. It had to be fine. He had to appreciate this, right? Sure, May wouldn't allow him to put on his suit again, but it wasn't like he was serious about this, right? He was just a kid. Fourteen. No one could reasonably expect him to do any sort of fighting. If he wanted to, he could totally walk away from it all. No one would blame him. And blaming himself would've been, ah, bad.

The snag was that quite frankly, the prospect that he would lose the only way he had to make up for his failures was terrifying. His head wasn't a fun place these days. Sometimes. Kinda. It wasn't - it wasn't that bad. Mostly.

He set his head down onto the Algebra 2 homework his tutor had assigned, sighing heavily. He cast his eyes up to the window in his section of the room, studying the darkening sky as the weight of his eyelids grew heavier and heavier.

Man, he just wanted to help people. Make up for his stupidity. Do - do good, okay? But he was also aware that it wouldn't make sense to anyone at the Compound. It would probably just worry them, and he didn't want to do that. However, by the same hand, he couldn't ignore the fact that if he never explained his view to them… if he never explained the why of it all, May would never give him permission to be Spiderman again.

He studied the sky, eyes narrowing. A shadow washed over his eyes, irritation sprouting up in his sternum. Three weeks here, going on four. Not even a month, dude, and he'd been reduced to this.

Peter could hear footsteps down the hall. Too light to be Captain America, too heavy to be May. Maybe Falcon? War Machine? Or maybe Mr. Stark?

He tensed. Peter was struck with a stab fear, inches from his heart. He hoped whoever was coming wasn't coming for him. As much as he may have wanted to work with Iron Man again, right now, he wasn't in a good place. He was too tired. Too…

God, he didn't even know anymore, but Peter couldn't get the image of the convenience store out of his head. How the fluorescent LEDs supplied a pervasive blue-white tint to everything in the store. How hungry he was. How perturbed he was by the fact that his stomach hurt a lot when he'd woken up, and how he was 98% sure he now had abs like Hercules.

Peter closed his eyes and stared vaguely at an equation that was far too close for comfort.

Peter stared at it, as if x held all the answers he needed. As if that stupid variable could answer the equation that his life had become, where there were too many letters and factors that he was losing track of. An equation that he knew was far above his level, that made him draw blank each time he looked at it.

You can do better, Parker. Get up.

In the end, Peter didn't.


The first one of Toomes' associates was caught without any effort. A large man who wore blue overalls under a large coat, where they found goggles amongst spare pieces of wires and a notebook chock-full of notes and designs written in chicken scratch. As the man came too, Natasha was flicking through it; Phineas Mason wasn't anything special, not by public records, with not even an associates degree to his name. His grades were unremarkable, although he did go to a prestigious catholic school for his primary and secondary education, and those middling grades were B's and high C's.

Mason blinked slowly for thirty-two more seconds, blearily taking in the room until his eyes bulged. "Wh-where-"

"A tower," Natasha cut him off evenly, "But that isn't the most important thing we need to discuss right now."

"Y-you're…" Mason stuttered, "Y-you're… what did I do? I haven't-"

"Among the charges you'll be facing," Natasha interrupted again, "Are illegal sale of arms, tax fraud, and conspiracy. And those are just the state laws."

Mason balked, glancing down at the handcuffs binding his wrists. "I, uh, don't know what you're talking about. I work IT for a salvage company. Bestman Salvage, look us up."

"We have, as a matter of fact," Natasha said, raising an eyebrow, "Awful lot of money being laundered there. We had to close the operation, I'm sorry to say."

Mason gawked for a moment, before failing to recover himself. "L-look… I-I didn't - I mean, I had no other way to make money, we had no other way to make money. Times were changing. We have to change too." Mason chewed the inside of his cheek. "Had. Had. We had to change."

"Your programming teacher said you had a remarkable talent for binary," Natasha raised both eyebrows, "Real talent. Why didn't you go to college? You could've made a decent living actually working in IT rather than selling weapons that get people killed."

Mason looked at his hands again. "I - It was just supposed to be summer gig, alright? I had stuff lined up for vocational school, but life got weird. The financial crisis hit and my family needed the money, so I stayed on."

"For nearly five years," Natasha replied lightly. "Sounds to me like you got attached."

Mason clenched his fists. "A solid job was hard to find, and this one paid, alright? And then Tony Stark-" he said the name with a harder edge, "-decides to take over the cleanup of the battle and pushes us out. I'd been on that gig for five years, man! Or, uh, ma'am," Mason finally looked Natasha in the eyes, but it appeared more like he was looking past her. "I'd just been tinkering with some of the stuff we'd salvaged and…" he started to glare, "I wasn't really hurting anyone! We sold to the bad guys, who'd hurt other bad guys! Isn't that what you guys do?"

Natasha studied Mason for a few more moments, before responding flatly, "No."

"Yeah, well," Mason muttered, "Y-you won't get anything outta me. Boss's got something going on tonight that'll take us all off the radar, permanently."

Natasha feigned surprise. "What?"

"Yeah," Mason said, "New deal, a lot of money on the line. It won't matter how much time you give me."

"We'd stop you." Natasha told him stiffly, "You wouldn't get away with that."

Mason grinned. "We will, though! He's doing it himself, full suit. Those mercs-" He abruptly stopped himself, then he began to stare. "Uh..."

"You can continue," Natasha said, "You might knock a few years off your sentence if you do."

Mason's eyes retreated back to his hands. "No. I'm not telling you anything."

"You gave us enough to find Vulture," Natasha said, "But if you give us his name we might get someone to talk to the judge, put you in a better part of wherever they send you."

Mason said quietly, "I-I plead the fifth."

Natasha shrugged. "Alright, but if you feel like saving lives, the NYPD will be more than willing to listen."

"NY - NYPD?"

"Yes," Natasha answered, turning away from him, "They're outside now, as a matter of fact. Enjoy the holding cell."

"W-wait-"

Natasha shut the door to the interrogation room and gave curt nods to the officers standing outside the doors. Steve was sitting down in the waiting area of the police station, reading a book, while Sam sat to his right, with Wanda to Steve's left. They received several stares when they first turned Mason in, but most of them had settled down. Wanda paid rapt attention as Natasha sat down across from them.

"Toomes is selling to Rumlow. Tonight."

Steve gave a small huff. "Did he tell us where?"

"No, but we can track Toomes's weapons. Just look for the ones that're moving."

Steve nodded. "Right. But we still don't know the exact hour?"

Natasha shook her head. "No, we don't. But we do know that Toomes uses tech now. He said that Toomes is doing the deal 'Full suit'."

"Sounds fun," Sam said, "I always love dealing with nock-offs."

"Hasn't vulture been around longer than you?" Wanda asked, a tad bemused.

"Oh, hush," Sam said, "Let me have my moment. I still haven't forgotten about that gag gift, just an FYI.."

"It was a real gift," Wanda sniffed, "It looked enough like you."

"They literally just recolored a parachute from a GI-Joe to make my wings." Sam shook his head.

Wanda's cheeks pinked. She murmured, "Still close enough."

"You're impossible," Sam sighed.

"Do you think you can get much more out of Mason?" Steve asked Natasha, looking at her pointedly.

"Definitely," she nodded, "But we need more time to plan. We only have a few hours before Toomes makes his move."

"Yeah," Steve put his book back into his jacket. When he caught Natasha's small smirk, he shook his head. "Yeah, I'm rereading Pride and Prejudice. It's nice to have a classic these days."

"Me? I said nothing."

"That's hilarious, Natasha," Steve replied dryly, "Now come on, we need to get going."

Natasha flew them back to the compound, finding part of herself rejoicing over the prospect of catch Rumlow and finally putting a stop to all of this, and another sect of her mind that gave the rest of her pointed glares. She forced herself to pay attention to the present.


Sorry for not updating for a while. Life came up.

I'm sad to say that the next update might take a bit. I want to plan out the rest of this fic until then, because I've mostly been keeping the plot in my head until now, and I want to finish this fic off well. Thanks for reading, especially my consistent reviewers, Blaney and MewWinx.

I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter, because I sure had fun making it! Feel free to tell me what you think about this chapter, and the story in general, I promise, I don't bite. Thanks for reading!