Chapter 71
They'd gotten the news that Thaddeus Thunderbolt Ross was coming to the Compound after they'd already been there for the better part of the day, training Peter on some of the courses and seeing what he was capable of doing.
And well, it was one thing seeing videos of her child online doing the things he was capable of doing, and an entirely different thing to see it up close.
It was, simply put, remarkable. If it wasn't also utterly terrifying. Watching Peter scale the sides of the room and hang upside from the roof with only his webs to hold him. Webs that he'd designed in his high school chemistry class.
On one hand she was so incredibly proud of her son and seeing him in action was amazing. But she was utterly terrified still.
She knew Steve felt the exact same way, with how he took baby steps, not wanting to push Peter all that hard so he wouldn't get hurt in training, but still knowing that if he didn't properly prep Peter then he'd be in worse shape when on the field.
And out of all the Avengers, it was Natasha who was the most rattled by the news. Harry had immediately began training his new nephew to fight hand to hand, and Ava had wanted to learn all about the science of it with Peter, and studied his web fluid, trying to figure out how they could expand it. Clint had thought it was awesome, but as a parent himself understood their wariness for the whole situation. He'd retired himself, but he understood the need to make sure Peter was trained and offered his assistance.
But Natasha who'd been a child soldier unwillingly. Natasha who had to do things she still wouldn't speak about. Well she had a personal interest in making sure Peter wouldn't be unprepared for whatever came his way.
And because of that, because of all their interests in making sure Peter was as ready, as trained as he could be, Peter was at the compound that Saturday when FRIDAY frantically alerted them that Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross was on his way to the facility.
She'd immediately shut down the training session, and Peter had looking at her confused.
"What no, I can go again!" Peter protested.
"It's not that," she told him, "If the Secretary of State is coming here, that means whatever he has to say cannot be good. And furthermore, we need to be ready for whatever he brings with him. And that means I need you to stay in your room here through it."
"I can handle meeting him," Peter said, looking unhappy.
"I have no doubts around you and your abilities to be around important people, Peter," she told her son, as they headed towards the briefing room. "However, I'm not sure how much you remember about Ross. You were young when Bruce first got his powers. But Ross made it his mission to hunt Bruce down and bring him in. Ross despises superheroes. But he particularly despises enhanced individuals. And if he even caught an inkling about you being Spider-man, well let's just say it wouldn't be pretty."
He looked pale at that, and she put an arm on his shoulder, "Hey, no matter what, I'm always going to protect you, okay? I want you to know that."
"I know," Peter assured her, giving her a smile. But she could sense his worry still.
"It's going to be fine," she said, trying to reassure him "No matter what happens, it's going to be fine.
He nodded at her, before he turned to leave. "FRIDAY, keep an eye on him, please?" she asked her AI gently. "Make sure he's okay."
"Yes Miss," FRIDAY responded. "The Secretary of State has entered the building and is on his way to the briefing room."
She nodded, as she moved swiftly, wanting to make it there before he came in. She only had a few moments, and she looked over the gathered Avengers. She looked over at Steve and nodded at him.
"If the Secretary of State is coming, it means whatever he has to discuss is not good news," Steve said to them as quickly as he could. "It also means he wants to catch us off guard and divide us up. Do not give him that satisfaction."
"Whatever it is he has to say, we'll deal with it," she said, as she nodded over at Steve. "I won't lie to you, Lagos is most likely what pushed all of this to go faster."
Pietro looked down.
"Just remember, we are the Avengers," Steve told them, "We'll stand together and face everything as a team."
The man in question arrived then, escorted by Rhodey. Ross tried to look as foreboding as he could, and she knew then that his news was not going to bode well with the Avengers.
"Please, don't stand up on my account," Ross said as she'd moved to get up. So she stayed seated, as he took to the centre of the room. "Five years ago, I had a heart attack. I dropped right in the middle of my back-swing. Turned out it was the best round of my life, because after 13 hours of surgery and a triple bypass. I found something 40 years in the Army had never taught me: perspective. The world owes the Avengers an unpayable debt. You have fought for us, protected us, risked your lives, but while a great many people see you as heroes, there are some who would prefer the word 'vigilantes'."
She raised a brow at that. Flattery to begin with.
So not good indeed.
"And what word would you use, Mr. Secretary?" Natasha asked, clearly trying to gage the situation.
"How about 'dangerous'?" He asked, looking over at all of them, as he pulled up images on the screen showing various clips of the Avengers around the world. "What would you call a group of US-based, enhanced individuals who routinely ignore sovereign borders and inflict their will wherever they choose and who, frankly, seem unconcerned about what they leave behind?"
The clips played on the screen from the last few years.
"New York. Washington, DC. Sokovia. Lagos," he narrated.
She forced herself not to close her eyes at the sight of the Chitauri on the screen. And when the city fell in Sokovia. Well so did her stomach.
She remembered Mrs Spencer's words then. Who will avenge her son?
"Enough," Steve commanded, as he placed a hand on hers under the table.
"For the past four years, you've operated with unlimited power and no supervision. That's an arrangement the governments of the world can no longer tolerate. But I think we have a solution," he said, as he handed them the thick file she knew was coming. The one she'd heard murmurs about for quite some time leading up to this.
"The Sokovia Accords. Approved by 117 countries," he told them all. "It states that the Avengers shall no longer be a private organization. Instead, they'll operate under the supervision of a United Nations panel, only when and if that panel deems it necessary."
Only when and if that panel deems it necessary.
"The Avengers were formed to make the world a safer place," Steve said slowly.
Ross looked him straight in the eyes, "Tell me, Captain, do you know where Thor and Banner are right now?" Steve looked away as Ava looked down. "If I misplaced a couple of 30 megaton nukes you can bet there'd be consequences. Compromise. Reassurance. That's how the world works. Believe me, this is the middle ground."
"So, there are contingencies," Rhodey said, trying to keep the situation under control while the man was still here.
"Three days from now, the UN meets in Vienna to ratify the Accords," Ross said. "Talk it over."
"And if we come to a decision you don't like?" Natasha tested the waters.
"Then you retire," Ross said simply, as he turned to leave. "No need to show me out."
The minute he was gone and out of earshot, the murmuring began. She could hear Rhodey and Wilson begin to bicker.
"This is no different than how any military or government operates," Rhodey said, trying to get the room under control. "With rules. With procedures. With a chain of command."
"Except we're hardly a military force, are we?" Sam argued. "You know as well as I do that if we used that structure, we'd be nothing more than a glorified force for the government. And who's to say that's the right structure either?"
"Secretary Ross has a Congressional Medal of Honor, which is one more than you have," Rhodey shot back.
"Yeah and look what happened to Banner because of him. Let's say we agree to this thing. How long is it gonna be before they LoJack us like a bunch of common criminals?" Sam shook his head.
"A 117 countries want to sign this. 117, Sam, and you're just like, 'No, that's cool. We got it'. " Rhodey ask him incredulously. "117 countries are telling us that they dislike how we function."
"How long are you going to play both sides?" Sam asked him.
"I have an equation," Vision cut in, and she looked at her grandson.
"Oh, this will clear it up," Sam said sarcastically.
"Watch it," Toni warned him, as she nodded at Vision to speak.
"In the eight years since Mrs Stark-Rogers announced herself as Iron Woman, the number of known enhanced persons has grown exponentially. And during the same period, the number of potentially world-ending events has risen at a commensurate rate."
"Are you saying it's our fault?" Steve asked slowly, trying to not escalate the situation.
"I'm saying there may be a causality. Our very strength invites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And conflict breeds catastrophe. Oversight; oversight is not an idea that can be dismissed out of hand," Vision said, scientifically.
"Boom," Rhodey shot back.
"Toni, you're being uncharacteristically non-hyper-verbal," Natasha said, looking at her. She'd flipped through the pages, glancing over the different sections. And well.
It wasn't good.
"What do you think?" Steve asked, looking over at her. The question was genuine as was the trust in his eyes. He wanted to know what she thought before they made a decision.
"I think that there's some grounds to it," she said softly. She pulled up a picture of Charles Spencer onto the screen, one she'd been staring at often over the last few days. "Charles Spencer. Computer engineering degree, 3.6 GPA. Position at Intel all lined up for the fall. But before that, he wanted to go on a humanitarian mission. To Sokovia. Building housing that was sustainable for the poor. He wanted to make a difference, and that cost him his life."
She took a deep breath.
"I know when we're on the field we're often thinking about how to win. How to make sure the bad guys lose. And how to keep people safe. But we're not always as careful as we could be. A lot of our process is fight, kick ass, go home. And not everyone gets to. Yes. New York would have been so much worse if we weren't there. The WSC was ready to nuke it. And Ultron would have decimated humanity. No one is arguing that we didn't save the day. But maybe if we had more oversight, more people who could help make the calls for things like strategy, we'd have less casualties. Less damage in our wake."
"And you trust these documents?" he asked her.
"Not as far as I can throw it," she snorted. "These are atrocious. Some of the provisions in this are truly terrifying. But there are other sections that are good. Sections that show promise. Take section 182C. The UN can request assistance from the Avengers in the case of a natural disaster to help relief efforts. Nothing scary there. These documents, in the current form, aren't perfect. But I'm not asking you to trust them. I'm asking you to trust me. Trust that I can make these better. Trust that they will not remain in this form."
Steve exhaled.
"If we have one hand on the wheel, we can still steer," Natasha nodded. "But if we take it off-"
"We lose control," Wilson said glumly.
"Exactly," Toni said. "So are we in this? Together?"
"Together," Steve nodded. "We'll head to Vienna in three days and ratify them. Make them better."
It wasn't until an hour after Ross had left and the Avengers had sat down to go through the Accords that Toni decided they should take a step back for a break and reconvene in a few hours. Peter had been in his room at the compound working on his homework and she wanted to check in on him. She'd had FRIDAY let him know when the coast was clear but she hadn't seen from him since Ross all but barged in and put on a power show and she wanted to make sure he was doing okay.
She knocked on his door, and when she heard him tell her she could come in, she carefully entered his room.
"Hey, are you doing okay?" she asked him as she saw him sitting on his bed, reading through articles on his StarkPad.
"I'm just reading about the Accords," he admitted to her, as he showed her the search results. And there it was, article after article, each one offering their own thoughts on the matter and flooding the media with their stories on what the Avengers would do in response.
"How did you hear about that?" she asked him.
He gave her a look, and she rolled her eyes.
"Your superhearing shouldn't have extended this far," she reminded him. "So were you lurking about, Peter?"
"I made sure to stay far enough away that he wouldn't be able to see me," he said as he looked at her sheepishly and she smiled at him.
"Of course you did," she laughed lightly. "So I take it you have some questions?"
"Why?" he blurted out. "Why do you need these? You're the good guys! Everyone knows that you fight for us! How can they even doubt that?"
"It's not that simple. No one is doubting that we've saved lives, Peter," she promised him. "But we haven't always made the best decisions along the way. Take the police force for example. If they make a bad call there's a chain of command. There's inquires into things that happened. They see if damage could have been avoided. And the cops that are out there saving lives are trying their best as well. But sometimes they make the wrong calls. So they owe it to the public to see if the situation could have been avoided or not. It's the same thing here. We're saving lives and we're helping others. But that doesn't mean that there are innocents along the way who end up as casualties. And we owe it to the world to say, 'Yes, those lives mattered too'. We owe it to them to try our best to make sure everyone makes it home at the end of the day."
"I understand," he said, looking down.
"Is something else bothering you?" she asked him.
"A lot of these articles mentioned how accountability is important especially when they are faces that are so well known like any of you," Peter said, as he placed the StarkPad down on the bed. "But they also speculated a lot about what it would mean for accountability for masked superheroes who don't reveal their identities. Whether superheroes like Daredevil who operate in smaller regions will need to reveal their identities. And how they'll face accountability if their identity is a secret. And It just got me wondering what will happen to me because of-"
"Spider-man," she finished for him with a nod. "Well do you want your identity to be revealed?"
He shook his head frantically, "No! I mean at first I just wanted to keep it a secret because I knew you and Dad would be unhappy if you found out the truth, but I'm still a teenager and I know it will change my life at school. Flash goes on and on about how much Spider-man is his favourite hero and he doesn't even know that I'm him. I'll get all this attention, both good and bad, and I don't know if I'm ready to handle it right now. And what if it puts Ned in danger because we're friends?"
"Then we'll keep it a secret," she promised him. "The Accords in their current form are in no ways perfect. Your father and I are heading to Vienna in a few days to go over all the amendments we need to make to them. You're our son, Peter, and we're not going to put you in danger, I promise you that. We'll work out some sort of provision for superheroes who want to keep their identities a secret out of fear of retribution for their families. We may need to let a few people in on your secret but we'll make sure there are protections in place. Especially given that you are a minor and are under my care."
"Am I going to Vienna?" he asked her, curiously.
She paused. She hadn't thought about it, in all honesty.
"Do you want to go?" she asked him after a moment, "It's going to be a pure political trip. But we're probably going to be there for a few days, and if you don't want to stay here with Pepper and Rhodey, then we can arrange something."
"I've never left the country before," he said, eyes widening in surprise. "I mean we travelled around America a lot and we went to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls once. But that's about it."
"Okay, then you'll come with us," she said with a laugh. "Vienna's a beautiful city and I'm sure Steve and I can arrange to take a few hours off here and there and we can sightsee. It can be our first trip as a family."
He grinned, "Sounds amazing."
She kissed his forehead, "I need to get back to going through the Accords with the others. Do you want to come down for a bit and go through it with us? Given that you have as vested as an interest in them as the rest of us do?"
"You want to know what I think about things?" he asked in surprise.
"Of course," she said, reassuringly.
"Okay," he said, with a nod, "I'd like that."
The two of them stood, as she wrapped an arm around Peter, and they made their way down to where the rest of the Avengers were to work through the Accords together.
Pietro sat on the steps leading towards the training grounds of the Avengers Compound. It had been a long day of combing through the Accords, page by page, and highlighting all the sections that they found of note, whether they agreed with it, wanted them amended, wanted it scrapped, or wanted to add more to it, and in all honesty, it was exhausted. He wanted nothing more than to run away from it all and leave it in his dust.
Still, he couldn't help but feel a sense of guilt over it. All of this was happening because of him. Because he and Wanda had been the reason Ultron had been created and the reason why Sokovia, their home, lay in ruins. He had been the one who'd carried that bomb in Lagos that had exploded in the busy city centre.
He could still remember his ears ringing as the blast exploded not too far from where he threw it. He could still remember the screams of agony for all of those who'd been hurt. And it was all because of him. It was his fault that now the world was demanding blood for all of those who'd been hurt and he had no one to blame but himself.
He could see it in Steve's eyes; the Captain regretted bringing him on the field. And Pietro didn't blame the man. How could he when he blamed himself as well?
"Pietro," Wanda said as she came outside to join him. "You need to stop."
"Know what I am thinking, do you?" he laughed bitterly.
"Of course I do, Brother," she said sitting beside him. "You are blaming yourself for what happened in Lagos, and you cannot do that."
She was silent for a few moments, "Do you remember the day our parents died? We were supposed to go out that day. Mother wanted to leave the city because of all the fighting and go to the countryside for a few days. We were supposed to leave that morning, but I'd thrown a fit. There was a program airing that morning that I desperately wanted to watch," she laughed coldly. "It seems so trivial now. But Mother and Father agreed that we could head out as soon as it was over. That I could watch the episode, the childish cartoon episode, then we could go. But just before it ended, that was when the shell hit our house. If I'd just not been so childish, if I'd just agreed to leave when they wanted to, then they'd still be here now. Mother and Father would have been alive. And none of this would have happened. It was so easy to assign the blame to Stark after their deaths. But I never wanted to admit that I blamed myself just as much."
"We were just children," Pietro said, as he recalled the memory, "Mother and Father loved you. It was why they indulged you and let you stay. They loved us both so much. It was not on you that they died. Nor was it on Stark. Our country was war torn, and they were caught in the crossfire."
"Just like those in Lagos," Wanda told him gently, "It was not their fault for being out there on the streets, but they died anyways. It wasn't your fault, you were trying your best. But sometimes we need to face consequences for our actions. We need to face what's happened. We need to learn from our mistakes so they do not happen again. No one is blaming you, Pietro for what happened. But we must face the consequences of our actions. Otherwise there will always be those who get hurt because they stood too close to the pair of us."
"When did you get to be so smart?" he asked her with a smile, and she laughed.
"I've always been the smarter twin, Brother," she told him with a smirk, "Even if I no longer have my powers, I'll always have my brains."
He smiled at her softly, "That you do," he acknowledged.
"Are you ready to come back inside?" she asked him as she glanced over at him.
"I think I need a few more minutes," he answered, honestly. "I just need to clear my head a bit more, you know. But I shall come back in shortly, I promise."
"Of course, Brother," she said, as she stood then, "Take all the time you need."
She headed back inside, leaving Pietro alone with his thoughts. He knew she was right. That this document was what was needed to properly make sure that people wouldn't die needlessly. That people like his parents wouldn't die needlessly. It was what the right thing to do was.
It wouldn't alleviate the guilt he felt. It wouldn't stop the screams he heard each night when he closed his eyes as he waited for sleep to come for him. It wouldn't make the deaths and less meaningful.
But maybe it would help him feel like he was trying to make the world a better place. Like he was the hero he was trying so hard to be.
He stood a few minutes later and took a deep breath as he headed back inside. It was time to make things right.
