Chapter 12: The Day After

"Guys, what is up with the floors today," were the first words out of Matt's mouth when he walked into art class.

Peter had spent the entire morning forcing himself not to stare at the streak of polished tile up the middle of the hallway. He'd just started to think that nobody noticed—not even Shuri mentioned anything, and she was the most observant person he knew. Clearly, he was wrong.

"What's wrong with the floor?" Scott asked.

"It's like they polished them. But only a few hallways and only a narrow strip right up the middle. It's the weirdest thing."

He was describing Pietro's superspeed wake, that was for sure. "How can you know that?" Peter asked.

Matt pointed at him with the end of his folded-up cane and said, "I can feel it. Cane glides way smoother over this narrow strip in the middle of the hall. I've never felt anything like it."

"Weird," Thor agreed.

Peter held his breath, bracing for more questions, but Matt dropped the subject. So it was noticeable, but only as an object of fleeting curiosity. Nothing worth investigating further. They were okay. He held back a sigh of relief. By the time sixth period rolled around, nobody else mentioned anything about the floors. Peter finally began to let himself believe that it wasn't out of the ordinary enough to cause a fuss. This was a high school after all, plenty of things happened that were way weirder than the hallways getting a wacky polish job. He walked into engineering relaxed and ready for another day in the shop. He had a lot to catch up on after skipping yesterday to plan the mission, but a lot of his peers had also procrastinated their projects too.

For the past several weeks, they'd been learning the physics of trebuchets and designing their own. They had this week to build them, and on Friday they'd take them outside and see who could launch golf balls the farthest. With only six people in the class, they each had to make their own instead of working in pairs. Whoever did the best got five extra credit points, so while they kept up idle chatter in the shop while they worked, there was also an air of secrecy, as nobody wanted to reveal the details of their design to the others.

Peter got all the pieces of his trebuchet cut the day before yesterday; today he would try to assemble them. Twenty minutes into working, he realized that he either mismeasured or botched the cut for one piece because it was almost a quarter inch too long to fit in its proper spot. He marked the cut with a pencil and headed over to the table saw, where Bucky had a small pile of pieces to get through. Peter planned to wait patiently for his turn and didn't say a word, but approaching him from behind like that must've startled him, because he snapped his head over his right shoulder to look Peter's way.

Peter flashed a smile which immediately plummeted from his face when he noticed that the movement had jerked Bucky's left hand into the path of the spinning blade. The saw tore easily through Bucky's knuckles and the wood beneath them. The shock must've been immense because Bucky didn't even flinch until he turned back and saw his severed fingers sitting on the wrong side of the blade. Peter screamed. Every head in the shop turned to see what had instigated such a panicked reaction.

Bucky clearly still hadn't registered the pain. "Shit, my mom's gonna kill me," he muttered. Peter started scanning the room for a towel or something to stem the bleeding, but nobody else in the room appeared nearly as freaked out about this as they should be. While the other students approached to see what all the fuss was about, they looked at the carnage with only fascination, not horror. Alex picked up one of the severed fingers and worked the leather glove fragment off, revealing a perfectly manicured fingernail. Peter's stomach threatened to spill its contents all over the shop floor, so he brought a fist to his mouth and swallowed convulsively. Scott picked up the pinkie and bent the first knuckle back and forth. Bucky picked up the other two and put them in his pocket. Peter's stomach rebelled again.

Shuri grabbed Bucky by the wrist and surveyed the damage. "Yeah, that's not going to be a cheap fix."

Bucky sighed.

"Someone please explain to me what the heck is going on," Peter demanded, sweat dripping down the back of his neck from the effort of not vomiting.

Bucky took one look at Peter and only then seemed to recognize that his reaction to the situation was abnormal. His eyes flitted to Shuri and she smirked at him. With a grumble, Bucky reached under his shirt and ripped something Velcro. He grabbed his left forearm and tugged. The entire arm came right out of his sleeve. Peter jumped, but when he saw that the arm ended in an empty socket, he realized what he'd been missing this whole time. The fingers Bucky severed were fake. His actual arm ended somewhere above his elbow.

"Is this some sort of hazing ritual?" Peter asked. It was a little late in the year to be hazed. He wasn't even the newest kid in school anymore.

Bucky laughed. "Absolutely not. I can't afford to chop my fingers off every time a new kid comes to school." He waved his prosthetic at Peter. "Do you have any idea how much this costs?"

"Okay. Not on purpose, got it. Are you okay?"

"My parents are going to kill me. I wasn't due for a new one for another year, at least."

"I'm sorry."

"'S not your fault."

Peter was still flummoxed by the whole situation. He'd spent time with Bucky every day for months now, how did he not notice that his left hand wasn't even real? Sure, he'd noticed that Bucky always wore long sleeves and gloves, and he used his right hand to position his left whenever he moved it, but he'd just assumed it was paralyzed or disfigured or something. The obvious question sat on the tip of Peter's tongue, but he figured now wasn't the time to ask. If Bucky wanted to explain, that was his choice. Instead, he asked, "Do you need any help finishing those cuts?"

Bucky smiled. "That would be great, thanks." Alex and Scott returned the other two fingers, and Bucky pocketed them.

"Was I the only one in the whole school who didn't already know?"

"Nah. It's pretty much just these guys. There was an incident in shop class last year. Set my glove on fire. The arm survived that, though. Only scorched the outermost layer a little bit, still worked perfectly. This, though," he held the hand up and examined the stumps of the fingers. "Might not be able to get it fixed for a while." Bucky's face crumpled for a brief instant before he shook his head. Clearly, the idea of going without an intact arm distressed him.

"Can we just…glue them back on?" Peter suggested. "I know it probably won't work the way it did before, but with gloves and long sleeves, nobody would notice."

"That's…not a bad idea."

Peter abandoned his trebuchet in favor of helping Bucky reattach his fingers. So did Alex, Scott, and Shuri. Without any clamps small enough for the delicate pieces, they had to hold them in place while the glue dried. Between the four of them, they managed to hold on to all four pieces, though it required them to stand packed together.

"This is officially the weirdest thing I've ever done," Alex said. They stood so close that Peter could feel the air from his voice on the back of his neck.

"I wish I could say that," Scott said.

Shuri shook her head. "I don't even want to know."

"What's going on back here?" Ms. Goodner asked. She stood in the doorway to the shop, headphones around her neck.

"We're reattaching Bucky's fingers," Scott explained. Bucky, standing several feet away from the huddle of people surrounding his arm, smiled awkwardly and flashed a curt three-fingered wave.

Ms. Goodner rubbed a hand over her face. "This is going to be so much paperwork." She put her headphones back on and returned to her desk.

Bucky cracked up.

"What do you think she would do if someone severed a finger for real?" Scott asked.

"Hopefully more than this," Peter said. "But at least we have each other in case of emergency."

"Yeah. You guys are the best," Bucky said.

"Do you think the glue is dry yet?" Alex asked.

"Only one way to find out." Shuri counted to three, and they all let go. The fingers stayed exactly where they put them, and didn't move with gentle and then more vigorous wiggling. It took Bucky a little while to thread the straps back through his sleeve and reattach the arm, and then to find a replacement set of gloves, but once he did, Peter couldn't even tell anything had happened.

"Maybe you don't even have to tell your mom," Shuri said. "She won't even notice."

"Oh she'll notice," Bucky said darkly. "But hopefully she'll be glad it was this hand and not the other one."

"I hope so too. I'm certainly glad it was that one," Peter said.

Bucky smirked. "Me too."

~0~

The following day, Peter had all but forgotten about the fleeting evidence of their mission. After a day of being traversed by hundreds of pairs of shoes, the streak wasn't even that noticeable. Nobody looked twice at Bucky either, their quick fix working just as well as they hoped. Peter was feeling great, until lunchtime.

"Actually, I'm going to sit with the dance team today," Steve announced as they walked toward their usual lunch table.

"Since when are you friends with the dance team?" Wanda asked.

Steve shrugged. "Natasha came up to me this morning and asked if I wanted to sit with them, so I said yes. I'll catch up with you guys after school."

They walked past another row of tables, and Wanda split off towards the other side of the cafeteria.

"You also made other plans?" Peter asked.

She nodded and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "Alex invited me to eat with him."

"So you have a date." Pietro raised his eyebrows.

"It's a school cafeteria, not a five-star restaurant."

"Sounds like a date to me."

She punched him in the arm. "Whatever. I'll see you later."

And then there were two. They reached their table, where Shuri and Bucky already awaited. Peter sat down and slid over for Pietro to join him.

"I'd love to stay and chat, but there's an archery club meeting I don't want to miss."

"You guys are meeting during lunch?"

"Yeah. Clint has permission from Hill to eat in her classroom."

"Okay. See you later, I guess."

Peter unzipped his lunchbox and stabbed a straw into his juice box with probably more force than necessary. He didn't even bother to pick it up to sip, instead resting his head on his hand so he could reach the straw.

"I've never seen anybody sip from a juice box so morosely," Bucky remarked.

"Don't worry, we don't have cooler friends to sit with instead of you," Shuri assured.

"Speak for yourself."

"Bucky!" The two initiated a five-second stare-off. "Don't listen to him, Peter," she continued.

"I'm not upset that they're making new friends," Peter said. Although, in Wanda's case—and maybe Steve's—'friend' probably wasn't the most appropriate term. He was happy that they were finding their own places in the world, especially after so long being denied any place. Still, a tiny little part of him had hoped that his role in their mission had made his siblings respect him more, maybe even start to view him as one of their own.

Shuri pointed her fork at him. "You look a little upset."

Peter shrugged. "I'm gonna miss them, is all."

"They're not gone forever."

"That's true." Plus, Peter would always be able to spend time with them at home. In all likelihood, they were more tired of hanging out with each other than they were of hanging out with him. Peter doubted he'd be able to resist the temptation to branch out after spending years with the same small group of people. They were simply embracing their newfound freedom. That's what Peter had wanted for them when he helped convince Mr. Stark to let them come to school in the first place. Peter had had no complaints about eating with just Shuri and Bucky before his siblings started school, so he was fine with going back to that dynamic. If he spent much of that lunch period glancing around to see Steve and Wanda, it was only because he wanted to check that they were having fun with their new friends.