The first time he met his parents, he was barely six years old. He and his best friend sat in their shared bedroom, Peter colouring and Wade throwing a rubber ball at the ceiling, when Miss Baker came in with a blond man at her heels. Peter did a double-take upon seeing him—he was so tall that his gaze initially landed on the man's shoulders rather than his face—and went comically wide-eyed. The blond's apparent partner, a more reasonably-sized man with rumpled, blackish hair and a rather interesting goatee, came through a few moments later with an uncomfortable sort of smile and hunched shoulders. He leaned back against the doorframe and shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as if unsure what to do with himself, offering both boys a hesitantly polite smile.

Miss Baker smiled at Wade and, in an effort to tame his wild hair, scraped her fingers gently across Peter's scalp before introducing the two men: Steve, the tall one, and Tony, whose need for a comb was almost as desperate as Peter's. The small boy said as much and attempted a grin, making Steve chuckle at the bewildered-indignant expression on Tony's face. Peter ran a hand over his hair and grew a little more relaxed when Tony, playing a mirror, attempted to sort out his own mess of hair before deeming it a lost cause and moving forward to stand beside Steve.

Steve crouched down to the young boy's level and tilted his head to the side, admiring the colouring of the Ninja Turtle. It's Donatello, Peter informed, and proudly added that he's named after an artist—"the famous one, who made paintings." Other adults would usually roll their eyes at this, but Steve manages to look impressed and comments that Peter must know a lot of things about the world if he knows Donatello.

Wade growled a quiet apology and took flight, his ears a curious shade of red as he elbowed his way between a monstrously startled Tony and an equally exasperated Miss Baker to race down the stairs.

Peter found him on the roof of the shed an hour and a half later, flattened on his stomach with his face hidden in the make-shift pillow of his arms. Mr Wickson hated when they were up there, but it was essentially Wade's safe haven. The younger boy sat cross-legged and picked at his shoelaces, waiting patiently.

"They liked you," Wade groaned after a long while. "They did, I can tell!"

"They might've liked you, too, if you'd stuck around a bit longer." He sighed and hugged his knees to his chest. "They're nice, Wade."

"They liked you, and now you're gonna go with them like—like I don't know what, like you're a little damn duck or something, following the big ducks—"

"What do ducks have to do with anything?"

Wade carried on as though he heard nothing, flipping onto his back to scowl petulantly at his friend. "Just don't forget about me, okay? When you're hanging out with the giant and the mess? Come visit me and junk. They'll wanna take you, 'cause you're adorable."

The sad part was that Wade was really serious about it all, as though Peter would up and abandon him to go live with some strangers. "Dude. They won't even want me," sighed Peter. "They're two guys; they'll probably want a little girl to bedazzle or something." He tried on a grin and socked Wade's shoulder playfully, only needing a whole half a second's pause before the older boy broke into a fit of giggles.

"Nah, d'you see the short one? Totally not the pink-and-frilly type.

"Wade. The giant? He looked like he just leapt out of 1942. He's definitely the pink-and-frilly type."

Wade sucked in a breath and turned to give Peter a wide-eyed stare. "D'you think they've got a time machine? Maybe Steve can take me back to '42 with him! I could beat up Stalin!"

"Stalin who?"

"Y'know, Stalin! The…" One finger was crooked to act as a moustache, wiggling rather like a worm over Wade's upper lip while a slew of what was meant to be Russian lurched out of his mouth. "Evil dictator guy?"

~!~

Giant Steve and mussy Tony (as the boys had taken to calling them) came back that Friday, talking animatedly with Miss Baker while Wade and Peter watched from the top of the stairs. Lucy, the shy three-year-old who bit Mr Davis last year when he fostered her and Paul, was twirling in her dress. Her chubby fingers were jammed in her mouth while the other hand clung to Miss Baker's skirt every few spins to keep her balance. Steve crouched down to her level and flashed a grin, probably complimenting the bow she had managed to put in her hair earlier that. The response was a grimace as Lucy and ducked behind Miss Baker, making Steve frown and stand up to exchange a look with Tony.

"You don't go with them," Wade ordered quickly, scowling down at them with his forehead resting against the banisters. "Don't. You can't, okay? Lu doesn't even like them, and she likes almost everyone."

"I won't, okay? Jeez, Wade, you act like they're criminals." Peter huffed quietly and tugged himself to his feet, pulling a frowning Wade up as an afterthought.

"I bet they are. Goatee-guy—"

"Tony."

"Tony, whatever—I bet he's in the mafia. Look at his suits! Who even wears suits?" Tony was, admittedly, wearing a suit. The slightly shimmery fabric didn't scream mafia to Peter, but he just shook his head in silence.

They came up to visit the boys after a while, and Steve prodded Peter into talking about his colourings again. After a long ramble about the Ninja Turtles, Peter turned beet red and quieted with an articulate "and, yeah." Wade rolled his eyes, but even he couldn't hide his enthusiasm when Tony made an idle remark concerning the make-shift slingshot Wade had shoved halfway under his pillow.

"Pete?" Wade asked, hushed but unsettlingly serious, later that night as they stared up at the crumbly ceiling. The younger boy grunted in response, turning to look at him questioningly. "If… if you go with them, promise to come visit me, okay?"

"I'm not staying even if they take me, Wade," he yawned. "You know that."

Wade made a choked sort of sound in the back of his throat, and for a second Peter thought that he was going to cry. "Don't. You've still got time, Pete, please…"

"You do, too." The words were forced, turning to sludge in Peter's mouth. Wade was turning ten soon. The only people that came in looking for ten-year-olds were the ones who wouldn't be safe to live with anyway. It's the unspoken truth of the house; the older a child was, the less likely it was that they would ever be adopted. Hank was thirteen when he officially became a McCoy back in the summer, but aside from him the oldest kid the group home had ever had go to a proper family was Annie—and she was only nine and a half at the time.

"Promise me, Parker." He took a deep, rattling breath. "If they're okay to you, you stay with them and you come visit me sometimes. Understand?"

"They won't even want me. Why are we even talking about this like it's a thing?"

"Please."

Peter swallowed hard and nodded in the dark. "Yeah, Wade. I'll visit as much as I can."

~!~

Steve and Tony visited one more time before Miss Baker pulled Peter aside and told him to pack his bag, smiling that hopeful smile she always got when people came for her kids. She wasn't a particularly good judge of character, but thankfully the child services workers were and they didn't usually land with the cruel people who made Miss Baker's smile turn tight for a while. Wade came home with a cast once and bruises a few times, though, and there was Sara Miscavage who smacked Peter so hard that she broke his cheekbone when he was five, but most of the people hadn't been outright horrible like them. Miss Baker seemed to really trust them, at least.

Peter didn't want to go with Tony and Steve when the time came, even though he really, really did.

Wade didn't come to see Peter off; when Peter went up the stairs to give him the usual bear hug, he ran back to their—his, now—room and slammed the door in the smaller boy's face. Peter promised through the wood to bring him a cookie or something when he came back, but the words went ignored. A minute passed before Peter repeated himself and trudge back downstairs, half morose at the thought of leaving his best friend without a proper goodbye and half thrilled at the idea of maybe having people who would care for him (for the month that he'd be staying—no matter what he had promised, he wasn't leaving Wade there alone).

Tony wasn't wearing one of his mafia suits this time—Steve still looked like he fell out of 1942, though, to be honest—and Peter was rather suddenly struck by the thought that Wade would like them if he tried. He idly twisted the cloth of his sleeve, chewing at the hem while Steve talked to Miss Baker. Tony ignored them both, turning instead to exchange a few words with Peter.

They were leaving before he knew it, stepping into the sharp winter air. Peter could nearly taste the smog in the dense mist, and the traffic was as loud as ever, but he couldn't help but feel like something was different. Maybe it's how he was holding onto Steve's hand or how Tony had slipped Peter's backpack from his shoulder to carry it on his own, but the familiar fostering routine seemed so foreign this time. A glance over his shoulder at the house and made Peter swallow a sudden pang of loss—deep down, he knew that he wouldn't be spending another night there, at least not for a while.

By the time they got home (rather, what would suffice for home over the next month), Peter was clinging just as tightly to the leg of Tony's trousers as he was to Steve's hand, struggling not to get lost in the mid-afternoon crowd and doing his best not to panic the one time Tony's steps led him a bit too far away. It took a while, but they finally arrived at the building Tony and Steve called home, which was guarded by a mean-looking bald man in what Wade would undoubtedly call a mafia suit.

Peter hid behind Steve.

They were riding the lift up to their floor (what kind of lift had pictures instead of numbers?) when Tony broke the silence, wondering aloud who was home. Peter jumped out of his skin when a disembodied voice responded with the information that someone called Natasha was attempting to get someone called Clint out of the air ducts again (again?) and that Pepper (a bell pepper or pepper like the seasoning, or was it Pepper like a name?) would be dropped off in an hour. He guessed that Clint was Steve and Tony's son, or maybe a nephew considering that nobody had mentioned him, and that Natasha was his babysitter, but didn't have time to ask before the doors slid opened with a soft bong.

Apparently his assumption wasn't all that far off. Natasha turned out to be a petite, red-haired woman of about Steve's age who shouted threats at the ceiling in her spare time. The vent near where her in-depth descriptions of evisceration (no, Steve, covering Peter's ears wasn't necessary for words he couldn't even understand) were directed toward clattered to the ground, causing Peter to flinch back from his hiding spot behind Steve and very nearly topple over into Tony's legs. This was followed by the considerably more graceful descent of the equally-grown-up man who could only have been Clint—and Peter's hiding spot shifting to behind Tony.

Clint didn't seem to even hear Natasha's scolding, instead plopping down on the ground in front of Tony with his hand held out to shake. Peter blinked and shuffled a bit to the left, squinting.

"You're really dusty."

He shrugged easily, "I spent a few hours in the walls, dust happens."

It made sense, of course, but Clint was very clearly old enough to be a grown-up, and grown-ups didn't just sit in walls. Peter shook the still-outstretched hand quickly and muttered his name before resuming pretending that standing behind Tony's leg would make him invisible.

"Hey, Tash, check out the kid!"

"I'm six. Six isn't a kid," he argued weakly, shifting a bit further to the right. (Tony, the traitorous jerk, took a few steps and suddenly Peter was front-and-centre.)

"Shame," sighed Clint. "I could totally use a kid-buddy to loosen up Meaniepants over there." He twisted around and stuck his tongue out in Natasha's direction, because he was a mature adult who climbed around in walls and that was what mature adults did.