Chapter 10 - The Twins

Jessica Jones slumped on the couch with her legs far apart and her arms crossed in front of her, eying Leonard as if he were the enemy.

Leonard had gotten used to encountering a certain level of resistance from his patients; none of the Avengers exactly wore their hearts on their sleeves. Even Tony, who could talk nonstop through a session without letting Leonard get a word in, had difficulty being completely open with him. But he was getting a little sick of Jessica's attitude; at this point, she was just wasting her time and his. "Ms. Jones, you are here voluntarily. What I can't figure out is why you keep coming back to these sessions, when you obviously don't want to talk to me."

"So, you're giving up on me, huh?"

Okay, maybe now they were getting somewhere. He had sensed before that Jessica might have some abandonment issues.

Jessica smiled and jabbed her finger at the ceiling. "I win, Tony. You hear that, you bastard? I know you listen to everything that goes on in here—"

"What?"

"You think I've really been coming here voluntarily? I made a bet with Tony that this therapy shit wouldn't work with me, and that eventually, you'd tell me to get out of your office and stop wasting your time. If I win, I get another year's supply of whiskey. If Tony wins, I have to keep going to therapy until my issues are actually resolved."

"I didn't ask you to leave, Jessica."

"But you were just about to. You can't say you weren't, because JARVIS will have it all on video."

"I really wasn't. Also, Tony and I came to an agreement months ago that in order to preserve the privacy of my patients, JARVIS's cameras and microphones would be removed from this office. He also had the vents rerouted, so that Natasha couldn't use them to spy on anyone in this room."

"You've got to be kidding me—"

Leonard reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a pack of crayons and a pad of sketch paper, which were still there from when he'd tried art therapy with Loki. "Like I said, I wasn't going to ask that you leave. In fact, I was going to suggest a new form of therapy. Now, I'd like you to take this paper and these crayons, and I want you to draw your feelings."

Jessica took the paper and crayons from him and sat on the ground in front of the coffee table. He watched as she took out a red crayon and drew a stick figure. The stick figure held up its middle finger, and in a speech bubble, it said, "FU, Dr. Samson." At the bottom, Jessica signed it "Love, Jessica Jones, Age 28." She ripped it out of the pad and handed it to Leonard with a smile, like a five-year-old proudly presenting her work to her kindergarten teacher.

Leonard smiled back at her. "Thank you, Jessica. I think I'm going to get this framed. I think that's enough for today, but I'll see you at the same time next week."

"Yeah, whatever." Jessica stood, grabbing her jacket from the couch behind her. "Stark's still out, right? I'm going to go raid his bar."

())red)))

"The jet is beginning its descent," JARVIS announced over the car's sound system. "Miss Wanda has agreed to hear you out, although I'm not certain she means it. Her brother requests that you prepare for your death, Sir."

"Oh, yeah?" Tony had been trying to play it cool in front of Cap, but his heart beat just a fraction of a second faster as he peered over the dashboard of Pepper's BMW. He would have taken his own Audi NSX or the Tesla Roadster, but those were two-seaters, and if everything went well here, they would be transporting two extra people back to the tower.

Tony started to open his door, but Steve stopped him. "I told you we should have brought police backup."

"Cap, I think the two of us can handle a couple of kids."

"Your arm is still in a sling. Even if it wasn't, you're not much of a threat to anyone without your suit."

"Hey, that's a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? I'll have you know that there are plenty of people who find me threatening." Mostly, those people worked in SI's legal and PR departments. "Just chill, Capsicle, and leave your shield in the trunk."

"You want us to stand around unarmed and wait for a couple of people who want to kill you to walk off that plane?"

"JARVIS doesn't think they're armed."

"That doesn't mean anything if they're enhanced."

"If you're that nervous, there's a gun in the glove compartment."

"So you don't mind if I have a gun, but you want the shield to stay in the trunk. You think a gun would be less threatening?"

"To them? Honestly Cap, I've been thinking we might want to repaint that thing, and maybe get you a new outfit. And a new name. What do you think of just being 'Captain Sparkles?' I'm thinking glitter, maybe pink and purple."

Steve looked away, which made Tony feel like a jerk for pointing out something that Steve had to have figured out on his own by now. "Alright, I get it. There's a lot of places in the world now where the stars and stripes don't exactly inspire trust anymore. But you're the one they're after."

Tony stood on the tarmac as the plane taxied down the runway towards them. Steve came to stand beside him; he had grabbed the gun Tony had stashed in the glove compartment, and he checked the safety before tucking it into the waistband at the back of his pants. Tony wondered if he ought to be offended that Steve would think he'd have a gun in his glove compartment without the safety on, but on the other hand, if he was going to stick a gun there, he'd probably double check too. "Okay, here we go," Tony said, as the plane came to a stop about thirty yards away.

A girl who looked a little younger than Loki appeared at the open door of the plane, and looked down at the tarmac below, frowning in confusion.

"The air stairs haven't extended yet," Tony called to her. "They won't until I give JARVIS the okay. I thought we could talk a little first."

The girl stepped out of the plane and floated down, enveloped in a red light.

Oh, shit. Maybe this had been a mistake. "Or you could just come down here, and we can have a talk," he babbled. The girl just scowled at him. "J," he said, lowing his voice to speak into his Starkwatch. "How good would you say this kid's English was?"

"Miss Wanda seems to be nearly fluent. Her brother is somewhat less so."

"Her brother, right—" Tony looked to the door of the plane apprehensively. Why hadn't the brother shown himself yet?

"Are you Stark?" asked the girl.

Tony thought about claiming to be someone else, but that wouldn't get him anywhere unless his goal was to make them trust him less than they already did. He took a deep breath to calm himself. "Yeah, that's me." He put his hands in the air to show her that he was unarmed. "I just want to talk. Wanda, right?"

"There is nothing you can say that will make me not hate you."

"Fair enough. If it helps, I hate me too. Or at least, I hate who I used to be. I've been trying to change."

"I don't believe you, and even if you have changed—"

"I know. It won't bring your parents back."

"Or our country. You say you wish to change, but you have done nothing for Sokovia, and Sokovia still suffers because of you."

"Another great point. Maybe you can help me, Wanda. Tell me what you guys need—infrastructure, educational opportunities, food relief. Whatever it is, I can mobilize the Stark foundation and pour my own money into it."

"Sokovia does not need your blood money."

"Just my blood, huh?"

A boy poked his head out of the jet and peered down at them. Then he jumped down, landing in a crouching position. As he stood, he pointed at Tony. "Stark! My name is Pietro Maximoff. You killed my father, prepare to die."

Wanda cringed. "Pietro, shut up! I told you to leave the talking to me."

Tony couldn't help but laugh, even though laughing at the person threatening his life probably wasn't the best thing he could do if he wanted to live. Steve furrowed his eyebrows at him, probably thinking he'd cracked. "If I get out of this alive, we're watching The Princess Bride next Avengers movie night."

Wanda clenched her hands and stamped her foot. Something about that reminded Tony of Loki when he was working himself up to a tantrum, but at least he had enough sense not to tell her how adorable she looked when she was mad. "Don't laugh at him. How many languages do you speak fluently?"

"Unless we're counting computer languages, one," Tony admitted. He knew he'd taken French or something in school—or maybe it had been Latin—but he didn't remember any of it. Because of Ana Jarvis, he knew a few phrases in Hungarian; but they were mostly things like, "Get over here now," "Don't make me say it twice," and "Have you been bewitched?" (Ana had filled in as his nanny every time one quit. He couldn't say why, but most of his nannies hadn't lasted for more than a few weeks.)

"We learned English from watching your American films and TV shows," Wanda explained. "He doesn't realize he's doing the accent, and he means what he says. You are the one responsible for our parent's deaths."

Steve stepped in front of Tony protectively. "Which isn't the same thing as killing them. Tony sold those weapons to the US government in good faith, thinking that they were going to be used in the defense of our country. He didn't know they would use them in air raids that would cause the deaths of civilians."

Tony stepped around him. "Actually, it was more like Tony didn't care what those weapons were used for." He looked back over his shoulder in time to see Steve give him the same look Pep gave him when he went off script at press conferences. Tony shrugged; either he was going to get himself killed, or he would prove to these kids that even if he was the most lowdown despicable person on the face of the Earth, at least he wasn't a liar. "The Tony Stark that sold those weapons didn't care what they were used for, because he thought it wasn't his responsibility once they were out of his hands. As long as Tony Stark had the money to support his addictions to alcohol, women, and cars, he didn't give a shit."

"Are you saying you're different now?" Wanda asked. "That's a nice car you're standing in front of."

Tony hitched his thumb over his shoulder. "This is my fiancée's lame car. But I get it, it's not like I took a vow of poverty or anything. Still, I don't sell weapons anymore, and I try to use what I have to make a positive impact on the world. I'd give it all up if I didn't think I was the best person to make sure the resources currently at my disposal go into funding projects and causes that are going to make the world better." Luckily, he and Leonard had been addressing the guilt he felt over being the beneficiary of an empire that had been founded on, as Wanda had put it, "blood money." Otherwise, he might have agreed that he was a huge dick for not renouncing all material possessions and moving into a cardboard box.

"You have a fiancée?"

Right, that wasn't public yet. Hopefully, this girl wouldn't rat them out to the press, but if telling her about Pep got her to see him as a person, that would be a good thing, right? That was what you were supposed to do when someone wanted to kill you, remind them that you were human, and that there were other people your non-existence would affect. "Her name is Pepper. She's the best. She was one-hundred percent behind me when I announced that Stark Industries was going to stop manufacturing weapons." She'd gotten on board pretty fast, anyway, after the initial shock of how he'd announced that to the world had passed. "I've also got a kid about your age." And just like that, Loki had been promoted to "like my kid" to his actual kid, but it didn't feel like a lie at all.

"I've never heard of Tony Stark having children."

"It's a secret. I don't want the kid's life to become a media circus, you know?" Which it would be, because Loki would probably be on trial for war crimes if anyone found out he was on Earth.

"What's their name?" Wanda asked, giving him a look that made it clear she thought he had just made up a kid.

"Lauren," he said, giving her the name he'd used on Loki's fake birth certificate.

"Is Lauren a boy or a girl?"

"Both," he told her. "They're genderfluid."

Wanda nodded; maybe she believed him. "I don't think I believe you."

Okay, maybe the idea that Tony Stark had a secret kid was a little tough to swallow without any proof. "I've got pictures." Tony took his Starkphone out of his pocket, unlocked it, and tossed it to her. He didn't quite throw it far enough, but a red light flared around Wanda again, and the phone shot up and hovered over her hand before falling into it.

Her brother hung over her shoulder as Wanda scrolled through the pictures. "Who's the pretty blonde?"

"You're going to have to be a little more specific," Tony told him. The pretty blonde could have been Pepper, but it also could have been Frigga, or even Natasha, from one of the times she had bleached her hair on a whim. Or for that matter, it could be Cap, but probably not, since he was standing there next to him.

"The one in the sexy underwear," the boy said.

"What?" Tony didn't remember having thosekinds of pictures of Pepper on his phone.

"I think that is one of the bikini bathing suits glamorous American women wear," said his sister, rolling her eyes. "She would not wear her underwear to sunbathe by a pool."

Tony breathed a sigh of relief. "That's Pepper. Lauren is the kid with dark hair. There should be vacation photos of them, too."

"Tony," Steve hissed at him. "You realize that in those photos—"

"Is Lauren a twin?" the girl asked.

Crap, right—there were photos of Loki wearing a two-piece swimsuit, and other photos where Loki had been wearing trunks. The problem was that in both photos, Loki had had the body to match the outfit, and in a bathing suit there was no claiming that there was any padding or flattening of certain areas going on. Now he had two options: he could lie and say that yes, Lauren had a twin named Kiki, or he could admit that they were a shapeshifting alien. Before he could decide, the boy pointed to the phone. "The girl is cute, whoever she is. I would date her. The boy looks kind of familiar."

Oh, shit. (And double shit, because did this kid just say he wanted to date his daughter?)

Wanda narrowed her eyes at Tony's phone screen. "He does look a little like one of the members of One Direction."

Tony breathed a sigh of relief, even though he was pretty sure her brother was a lot more One Direction-y looking than Loki. "Which one?"

Wanda shrugged. "I don't know. All of them? American boys all look the same to me."

"Pretty sure One Direction is British." Not that he would know.

"They still look the same."

Okay, fine. They could unpack Wanda's inability to tell the difference between boys from predominantly English-speaking countries later. At least no one was pointing to the photo and going, Hey look, it's that guy who invaded New York.

"So which is Lauren?" asked Wanda.

Briefly, Tony considered telling her that some of the photos had been digitally altered, but that would just be weird. "Okay, so full disclosure, Lauren is adopted, and they aren't full-on normal human. They're a shapeshifter." Wait, was that less weird?

"Oh," said Wanda. (Oh? That was it?) "How did they get this ability?"

Right, Wanda and her brother weren't full-on normal either. "I think they were born that way."

"Are they a mutant?"

"No, they're something else." Tony wondered if Wanda and Pietro were mutants, which would explain the weird powers. He didn't think it was the right time to ask, though.

Pietro tilted his head as he looked at whatever photo they were looking at now. "Actually, Lauren does not make a bad looking boy either. I would date him as well. I believe the English expression is 'swipe right.'"

Wanda stared at her brother for a moment, and Tony hoped she would tell him he shouldn't be lusting after their mortal enemy's kid. But then she nodded. "I also would 'swipe right.'"

"Maybe we could share," Pietro told her. "Sexy twins in American TV shows always share."

Tony was beginning to regret letting them look at those pictures. "Now hold on just a minute. Neither of you have even met them. They could have an awful disposition. They're my kid, you know. Remember how you think I'm a giant dick? They say the apple doesn't fall from the tree."

"Tony," Steve said, grabbing him. Later, Tony was going to have to make sure the man understood that the one thing he hated more than being handed things was being manhandled. "You know, if they want to meet 'Lauren,' maybe we should let them."

As much as Tony hated the idea of using Loki as bait, it might work. "Okay, tell you guys what. You guys want to meet my kid, that can be arranged. But you're going to have to come back to my tower with me—"

"The beauteous Lauren, they are at this tower of yours?" asked Pietro.

"They will be later tonight. Right now, they're on their way back from their bio-Mom's wedding—flying commercial, because you guys jacked my jet. Anyway, if you guys will agree to behave yourselves and not try to kill me, you can get in the—"

"I call shot gun."The next second, Pietro was in Tony's passenger seat. Damn, Loki hadn't been kidding when he'd said the kid was fast—all Tony had seen was a blur out of the corner of his eye.

"I was going to say get in the back of the car," Tony called after him.

"I am sorry for my brother," said Wanda as she sauntered past him. "He is—what is the American expression? Oh yes. He is an idiot." She let herself into the back of Pepper's BMW and shut the door behind her.

"Tony, we should be careful," said Steve. "That was much too easy. They might still try to hurt you."

"Maybe. For all we know, they're going to try to do something to make us crash before we get to the tower, which is why I would have preferred for them both to sit in the back. Then again, I have a feeling the girl could just suffocate me with her magic if she wanted to. You know, like Darth Vader? You have seen Star Wars by now, right?"

"Yes, Tony. You've already made me watch all three movies."

"Just remember, there are only three," said Tony, as he slid into the driver's seat. "If anyone ever shows you a movie with a character named 'Jar Jar Binks' and tries to tell you it's Star Wars, don't believe it." Steve got into the back with Wanda, and Tony pushed the Start Engine button. "You guys hungry or anything? You've been on a plane for like, nine hours."

"I'm starving," said Pietro.

"I'm fine," said Wanda.

"That means she's starving, but she will never say she is." Pietro pitched his voice an octave higher. "Pietro, it is fine. I ate a stale piece of bread crust two days ago; you eat the rest of the apples we found in that dumpster by yourself."

Had these kids really been eating dumpster fruit? An uncomfortable feeling settled in Tony's stomach. "JARVIS, pull the car into the first fast food restaurant with a drive through, got it?"

"Of course, Sir," said JARVIS.

┗(^o^ )┓三

Steve had ordered an entire bag of burgers for himself, but he ended up handing over more than half of them to Pietro, who had finished his own giant-sized Big Duck combo in less than ten seconds. That wasn't an exaggeration—the food had been in his hands, and then it had been gone, and for a minute, Steve had worried he'd eaten the wrapper, but then it had drifted down to the floorboard next to his feet.

On the other hand, Wanda had ordered a junior cheeseburger and had eaten less than half of it before complaining that American food was too salty and refusing to eat anything else. But when Loki had still had difficulty eating, Bruce had told them that they shouldn't try to force her to eat. When she hadn't been eating enough, it had caused her stomach to shrink, and too much at once would have made her sick. With that in mind, maybe it was Pietro they should be worried about.

͇͇͇_͇║͇͇͇_

\_/_|三三|

"Wow, I am so glad I took Pep's car," said Tony, peering into the backseat. "That is an impressive amount of sick." First Pietro had hurled, and then Wanda had been sick as well. Tony had no idea if her stomach couldn't tolerate the food, or if it had been in sympathy for her brother. "I'm tempted to just have JARVIS drive the car off a cliff or something. Then I could get Pep a less lame car."

"I'm sure it can be cleaned," Steve told him. "Only you would think of a BMW M class as a 'lame car.'"

"It's just not, you know, flashy. And now, kids have thrown up in it. I'm pretty sure that officially makes it a soccer mom car."

"It's your own fault for driving too fast, and for not pulling over the first time the kid complained about feeling sick."

"You—" Wanda came out from behind the car where she and Pietro had been crouched over, making sure their stomachs were empty. "You have tried to poison us!"

"Uh, no. You guys just ate food you're not used to, in quantities you're not used to. I'm sorry, okay? We shouldn't have let you do that, but it wasn't intentional." Tony reached out to rub her back between her shoulder blades. That always seemed to make Loki feel better when they were sick, which might be much too often, now that he thought about it.

"What are you doing?" Wanda demanded.

"Shit, sorry." Tony pulled his hand away as he backed up. "I wasn't trying to be creepy; I was just trying to make you feel better."

Wanda blushed, then mumbled something he didn't catch before running back around to the other side of the car. Tony pulled out his phone to text Happy and then call a tow truck. There was no way he was getting back in the car until it had been detailed.

He would have had JARVIS drive it back to the tower, but technically, it was still illegal for a car to drive itself without a human in the driver's seat, and while he could have afforded to pay whatever fine he might have gotten for letting his car drive itself down the highway with no one in it, if it got out that Tony Stark had flouted the law (again), it would be bad publicity for both SI and the Avengers, and Pepper was already going to be pissed at him for taking her car and not bringing it back in the same condition it had been in beforehand.

（～Д～)（≧ｍ≦） ( ° ෴ ° ;; )

Happy dropped them off in front of the tower, and he and Steve ushered the kids into the building and onto the elevator. Tony decided that if he wanted to be in the least amount of trouble, it would be best to find Pepper before she came looking for him. The elevator opened onto the penthouse, where she must have been lying in wait for him, because as soon as he stepped off the elevator, he saw her coming towards him faster than a woman in four-inch heels should have been able to move. "Tony, where have you been? Did you take my—" She stopped in her tracks. "Who are these kids?"

"Oh right, I'm supposed to tell you before I adopt again." Tony realized too late that he shouldn't joke about that. He smiled at her sheepishly. "Actually, these guys tried to steal—well, successfully stole our jet, so I had JARVIS put it down in that old airfield in New Jersey. You know, the one near the old SI factory? Then Cap and I went to pick them up."

"I see," said Pepper, blinking at the kids, who just looked like normal kids when they weren't speeding around or doing weird magic. "How did they manage to steal the jet? Wasn't Clint watching it?"

Tony turned back to the kids. "Oh yeah, I meant to say something about that. Beating up Clint and screwing with his head wasn't nice. I think you guys ought to apologize to him when he gets back."

"We wouldn't have had to do anything to him if he had let us have the plane," said Pietro.

"Clint's whole job was to guard that plane," Tony told him. "He wasn't just going to let you have it. Steve, could you go find a couple empty guest rooms to put these guys in?"

Pietro grabbed his sister's hand. "You can put us in the same room."

"If you guys want to stay together, that's fine. I'm not trying to separate you, it's just that all the rooms are singles, and I thought you might want two beds." If they stayed for any length of time and still insisted on staying together, he could have the bed in their room replaced with a couple of twin beds. Or maybe bunk beds. Bunk beds were always fun.

"We're fine with sleeping in the same bed," Wanda told him. "One time, we spent two whole days hiding under a bed together, looking at an unexploded mortar shell with your name on it, waiting for it to explode and kill us."

"Oh, my God." Pepper gasped, and her hand came up to clutch at the chunky gold chain around her neck. She fiddled with it nervously as she spoke. "On behalf of everyone at Stark Industries, please let me—no, that's not something you can just apologize for, is it?" She turned and strode towards the penthouse kitchen, where she stood awkwardly leaning over the sink.

Ah, hell. Tony had intended to explain things to Pep gently once Steve had taken the twins to see where they'd be staying. She'd told him before how she felt complicit in a lot of the dealings that now haunted his own nightmares. She had only been his assistant at the time, but she had still taken a job at SI without giving a whole lot of thought to what it meant to work for the Merchant of Death.

He could only guess that after what had happened with Obie, she'd had a lot of time to think about it. "Steve, take the kids and find them a room, or better yet, take them to meet Leonard. I have a feeling he's going to be working with them. Just get them out of here for a minute while I talk to Pep, alright?"

Steve nodded and ushered the kids back onto the elevator. Once they were gone, Tony joined Pepper in the kitchen. "It's okay," he said, wrapping an arm around her waist. "I mean, it's not okay, but it's going to be okay. They came here to kill me, but I get the sense that they didn't plan that part out too well, probably because they're just kids and they don't really want to kill anybody. But now that they're here we have a chance to make things—well, not right. But better."

"I'm guessing their parents—"

"Killed, probably in the same air raid where they were caught with a shell that didn't detonate."

Pepper nodded. "So, what's your plan? We could offer them some sort of financial compensation, then return them to their own country—"

Tony could tell that she didn't think that was enough, but like a normal person, it hadn't even occurred to her yet that Tony would want to keep a couple of kids that said they wanted him dead. "Thing is, these kids aren't just normal kids. He's super-fast, and she's kind of weird."

Pepper turned around in his arms, bringing them face to face. "What does that mean?"

"He has super-speed, and she has witch powers."

"Witch powers?"

"Like Frigga and Loki, sort of. She can make things levitate and float around in the air."

"I've never seen Frigga or Loki do either of those things."

"Good point. On second thought, her powers might be completely different than theirs. Anyway, I think we should keep them here, at least until we figure out where they got their powers from. I mean, I guess they could have been born with them, but I've kind of got this bad feeling about it, Pep. I mean, what's the chance that these two kids that want to kill me were born with powers?"

Pepper arched an eyebrow at him. "Considering how many people there are in the world who have a reason to want to kill you? Tony, you get death threats all the time. This is just the first time you've brought someone who threatened your life back to the tower."

"Technically, it isn't the first time. Loki might not have been the one in control, but he did throw me out of a window."

Pepper pursed her lips at him, and he knew she was waiting for him to admit that he had understood her.

"I mean, I do get that it's not statistically improbable that some of the people who want me dead are enhanced. I still get the sense that there's something bigger going on here, though. The others should get back by tonight. Maybe Loki will at least have some insights into the 'witch power' thing."

ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ-(•̀_•́)-ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ

"These are the kids who stole Tony's plane?" Leonard whispered to Steve, as the kids that had followed him into Leonard's office sat at the coffee table doodling with the crayons and paper left over from Jessica's "art therapy" session.

"Yeah."

"And Tony brought them here, instead of handing them over to the police?"

"It's complicated, Doc. Their parents died in an air raid, and they blame Tony, because he made the shell that killed them. Tony feels guilty about it, and so does Pepper—"

Leonard hummed in understanding. It might be healthy for them to feel some guilt, so long as it didn't consume them, and that they used it to focus themselves on righting the injustices that SI had contributed to.

"Also, they've got powers," Steve continued. "The boy is super-fast, and the girl is—well, she's weird."

"What does that mean?"

"She's got some sort of magic, like Loki."

Leonard watched as Wanda lifted her hand, and a red crayon levitated off the table and shot into her hand like a magnet. "I've never seen Loki do that, but it does look like magic. When you say that he's super-fast, do you mean that he can run fast, or that he's highly intelligent?"

"Look, Wanda. I am a walnut." Pietro had taken two crayons and stuck them up his nose. Leonard winced as he flashed back to his days as a medical intern, part of which he'd spent working in an ER. Consequently, that had been when he'd made up his mind to pursue psychiatry. If those crayons got stuck, he wasn't going to be the one to pull them out. Unless the kid couldn't breathe, he'd just have to wait for Bruce to get back.

"Walrus," Wanda corrected him.

"Wal-rus," Pietro repeated, then took one of the crayons out of his nose and stuck it in his mouth.

"Uh, Pietro—" Steve called to him. "If you're hungry again, I'm sure Doc won't mind if you help yourself to the snack bar. Just try not to make yourself sick this time."

Pietro leapt up, and in a blur of light he was behind them, munching on a handful of the brightly colored cereal that filled one of the bins behind them.

Leonard wandered over to the table where Wanda still sat. "Is that you in your picture?" She wasn't a great artist. Her drawing consisted of primitive shapes and stick figures, giving it a childish quality, but there was an energy to it that was—expressive, he supposed. "It looks like you're wearing a red dress, and you're dancing?" More than anything, it was a guess.

"I am dancing on Tony Stark's grave." With a black crayon, she drew a cross for Tony's headstone. "You are a doctor?"

"Yes, I am," he said, sitting down next to her on the floor so he wouldn't be looming over her.

"Are you a scientist?" Wanda asked him next, without looking up from her picture.

"Psychiatry is a science, and there are some psychiatrists who are research scientists. But no, I wouldn't call myself a scientist."

"Good. I do not like scientists."

If that was the case, maybe he ought to warn Bruce. "What's wrong with scientists?"

"It is not any of your business."

"Sorry, being nosy is kind of my job. I just want to help, but you don't have to tell me anything you don't want to."

Wanda still didn't look at him, but she bore down harder on her crayon as she scribbled. "Then I won't tell you anything."

Well, this should be fun, thought Leonard. Wanda might be a harder nut to crack than Jessica Jones. He looked up in time to watch as Steve attempted to physically drag Pietro away from the snack bar before he finished the entire bin of cereal he'd been eating from.

...φ(ｰ￣*)

Author's Note:

Oh dear, why is there so much swearing in my writing? (And vomiting, for that matter?) I tend to worry less about offending people than when I started posting my first fic, but I'm still self-censoring when it comes to the "F" word. I'm not sure why, since everyone knows what that word is anyway and I doubt anyone would care if I just typed it out.